Re: <nettime> Aaron Swartz charged for downloading too many Journal articles from the Library: Please sign suport petition.

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

I think two issues, though very much related, are being mixed up here.

On one hand there is the commercial corruption of big academic presses
and academic journals publishers making obscene profits on basis of
publicly financed information resources and then gouging the public,
and every year more (*). The facts are well established and well
known. And things are slowly - too slowly - changing.

Then there is what you could call moral corruption, and that is alas
much more difficult to combat since it is happening from within
academia itself. At the Commons Conference in Berlin, where I hold an
agitated (my trademark ;-) elevator pitch for radical open access,
I learned with some surprise from the (German) chair of our working
group that he knew many academics who were quite attached to the
'closed shop' system of academic publishing. Because its financial
wall 'protected' them against the great unwashed...

It's a funny world. But not for Aaron. Do sign!
Cheers, p+3D!


(*) And then we are not even talking about rights recovery agencies, which
for all practical purposes can be considered criminal rackets - in the
case of the Spanish SGAE this is even actually so.
JSTOR, being a non-profit, does admittedly not fall in that category. Yet
it 'recovers costs' that should not be there in the first place.




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