Articles from JSTOR
October 27, 2014
Aaron Swartz, the brilliant computer whiz, committed suicide subsequent to being prosecuted and persecuted over his having downloaded almost 5 million articles from JSTOR at MIT. These articles are available via internet through library subscriptions, which is how academics, but not the general public, gain access. The barrier to wider distribution is copyrights held by the journal publishers.
It is from JSTOR that I obtained the David L. Atheide and Jennifer N. Grimes article on how PNAC took America to war. JSTOR attempted to make amends by making its articles more accessible to the general public. One can now download 3 articles in 2 weeks. This is still a huge barrier to anyone who wants to do some serious research. On any topic, there might be dozens of articles and a user doesn’t know which ones are most relevant until he has scanned a large number of them. It’s impossible to browse with such a limitation.
Copyright is a very serious barrier to the generation of knowledge and to its diffusion. Far, far more is unknown than is known. The prospective returns on knowledge are therefore very high.
Renowned physicist Richard Feynman articulated this in the following way:
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on.
“It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are.
“If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming ‘This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!’ we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
“It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.”
Congratulations, Tom DiLorenzo!