danah, As one of the people who helped spark the #pdftribute movement, I'm a bit chagrined to hear that. I didn't know Aaron's thoughts on the PDF format, but they make total sense. Of course he wouldn't like a proprietary, non-machine-readable format! Right. Well, now that we've started this thing, I hope this does in fact move the cause of open academic scholarship forward. People have been working on this for a long time, and some people have been extra conscientious about contracts (which is very important), but maybe this will provide the spark that will cause many people to come together to make this happen. I know we all have way too many projects, but if you're interested in being a part of this in any way, we'd love to have your help and thoughts (and maybe we can make sure the archive is HTML instead of PDF!) Best, Jessica On 15 January 2013 05:15, danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> wrote:
Forgive me for laughing, but there's a huge irony in all of this. Aaron hated PDF. It is a commercial proprietary format that cannot be easily parsed by bots. If your goal is to honor Aaron, don't just make your work human readable; make it machine readable by using a text-based markup language. Think: HMTL.
To the broader issues, you'd be amazed at how often you can negotiate copyright with publishers if you try. Not all. Sage is particularly unpleasant. But I've worked hard to keep copyright whenever possible and have succeeded more often than I expected. It's also possible to negotiate alternative licensing agreements with publishers or agreements that have expiration dates where they revert to you. You just need to be proactive about this. But if you look in many of your contracts, you'll see that there's a three year expiration. Some even have an allowance for reposting on websites owned by your employer as the default. Read the legal forms you sign when it comes to your work.
No matter what, if you're a scholar, make a darn website that lists all of your publications. Make it easy for search engines to find you and your work, even if you can't put the article itself online. If you aren't just publishing for the social capital and status games of academia, you have a responsibility to try to make it easier for the public (including the machine public) to know about your work. Getting the articles out there is important but we all know there are institutional bullies that prevent this from being easy. But you can still do a lot to make your work broadly accessible by making it easily findable both for curious humans and machines. This isn't perfect, but it's a better machine-readable organization scheme than just linking to articles on Twitter under an ephemeral hashtag.
danah
On Jan 14, 2013, at 5:38 PM, Burcu Bakioglu wrote:
Hi all, I have to say, this incident came as a big shock to me as it did for all of us. And I appreciate and support the tribute, don't get me wrong. But couple of concerns come to my mind as we're dumping all of our research online. And I'd like to discuss this instead of sitting quietly in the corner:
1) I know this is a very emotional time for all of us, but when you are putting your published articles online, do you have the rights to it? I mean, clearly, any publisher who goes after any of the researchers amidst the heated debate led by Lawrence Lessig and other activists right now would be insane. Media would attack them like vultures, but still, I wonder if we are putting ourselves at risk. What happens when the dust settles? Now, we may not care about this at all since apparently Aaron didn't. And maybe that is the appropriate attitude. After all we are engaging in civil disobedience, right? But this is worth discussing. If you are a known researcher, surely you can weather the consequences, but the up-and-coming ones are at a higher risk.
2) Secondly, are we doing this merely as a gesture or so that the academic community at large and the entire world could benefit from this? From what I gather, Aaron would have preferred the latter. If so, looking at the pdftribute site, it is nearly impossible to retrieve the articles relevant to one's own research unless you know the twitter handles. Internet was of no use until it was organized and this repository would be no use to any of us until it is indexed. Now maybe the site owner has plans to incorporate this, I dunno. At the bottom of the site, it says that s/he is not responsible for the quality of content and that s/he will look into it later. I don't know what that might mean... Or maybe this is set up just as a gesture/protest and we don't care about what happens afterwords. In which case, it is rather short sighted of us, but that's OK... Point has been made.
I myself am planning on dedicating the current article that I am writing (on piracy no less) to him... and signed a petition or two. And am seriously considering taking Alex's suggestion and publishing in open-access journals as much as I can. But would like to hear your thoughts on these issues...
BsB
On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Jessica Richman <jessica.richman@gmail.com>wrote:
Thanks, Denice. Much appreciated, and hope it will do some good.
On 14 January 2013 22:08, Denice Szafran <szafran@geneseo.edu> wrote:
I posted links to all my online material right after it went out on Twitter. It seems to be a fitting tribute, and I encourage everyone to do the same. #pdftribute
Denice Szafran
On 1/13/2013 6:01 PM, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.**org< air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org>wrote:
On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 3:58 AM, Jessica Richman <jessica.richman@gmail.com>**wrote:
Please tweet #pdftribute and post your papers online in tribute to Aaron > Swartz, who committed suicide yesterday, after being hounded by prosecutors > in the US.
-- Denice Szafran, Ph.D. Visiting Lecturer and Coordinator of the Linguistics Minor Anthropology Department 13F Sturges, 1 College Circle, Geneseo, NY 14454 585-245-5174
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-- Thanks,
Burcu S. Bakioglu, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Fellow in New Media Lawrence University
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