From: Stevan Harnad <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 06:30:00 -0500

On 2013-02-26, at 10:23 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> There is an article in the Chronicle on Aaron Swartz.  The title is
> "Aaron Swartz was right" … "The current academic publishing
> system is prettied-up extortion. He defied it, and the rest of us
> should too" ... the Chronicle's article is, itself, locked behind the
> Chronicle's pay-wall.  And I wonder if they are aware of the irony...
> http://chronicle.com/article/Aaron-Swartz-Was-Right/137425/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

1. No irony. It's important to sort this out clearly:

2. Peer-reviewed journal articles are author-give-aways, publicly
funded and written exclusively for research impact; they are not
written as publisher works-for-hire.

3. CHE articles are written as publisher works-for-hire.

3. The tragic death of Aaron Swartz had nothing to do with authors
giving away their own give-away work,  publicly funded and written
exclusively for research impact (green OA).

4. Prosecution for user "piracy" of author give-aways is nevertheless
deplorable.

5. JSTOR may or may not have been extortionate over their investment
in retroactive scanning and archiving.

6.  But, again, investment in retroactive scanning and archiving
services has nothing to do with OA.

It does not help the case for OA -- which is authors giving away their
own author-give-aways, publicly funded and written exclusively for
research impact  -- to conflate it with other forms of digital
content, and actions by parties other than the author.

Stevan Harnad