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