Nearly 20,000 ‘legally obtained’ scientific papers released online in protest at charges

Copies of nearly 20,000 scientific papers have been released online by an activist protesting against charges levied by publishers.

Gregory Maxwell, the 31-year-old protester from Virginia who released the files claims they were “legally obtained”. He invited users of a file sharing website to download them because, he said he wanted to “make the documents available so that more people are free to enjoy them and learn from them”.

He also said he was motivated by the case of Harvard fellow Aaron Swartz, who was arrested by the FBI on charges of wire and computer fraud after he downloaded more than four million academic articles from JSTOR. The 24-year-old programmer and fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Centre for Ethics is said by supporters to be a “scapegoat”, who has done nothing more than “‘check too many books out of the library” over a three month period.

In a statement posted with the release, Mr Maxwell said he has been in possession of the files”for a long time” but said that he had been “afraid” to release them.

He said: “When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia’s sister site for reference works, Wikisource, where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles.”

He added that he felt he made the wrong decision in delaying their release, partly because of Mr Swartz’ arrest on Tuesday, “for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR”.

“Academic publishing is an odd system the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they’re just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers,” wrote the activist.

He added: “And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.”

He said that the “liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry” and added that, if he could “remove even one dollar of ill-gained income” from the industry, “whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified”.

JSTOR has been contacted for a comment but has not yet replied.

@KevinJRawlinson

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