Post on OTW blog: Aaron Swartz and the importance of open access

[unjapanologist]

New post by me on the OTW's main blog, about the importance of open access for fan studies and what I think open access really means. It also includes a small teaser for an upcoming project that I and a few other OTW folks have been hammering away at for months. (Why yes, I am kind of preoccupied with this open access thing.)

Many thanks to everyone who helped improve the text!

Comments

[bookshop]

oh, was that you? excellent post.

[unjapanologist]

Thank you.

[elf]

Related (I have a couple of tabs open, and I can't figure out where I got those links; I know I've been following EFF announcements, so maybe it's something from them?): There's a project to legall acquire and openly distribute PACER documents, the court documents which are in the public domain, but which access to is strictly limited by a per-page fee... which is kept to 0 if the number of pages-per-quarter accessed are low enough.

So the average person can get a few documents for free, but not the dozens that encompass most complete cases, and not the hundreds that may be necessary to research legal precedents.

Operation Asymptote "is an initiative designed to download as much of PACER as possible by spreading the burden across many individuals, none of whom need to spend anything by staying under PACER's $15.00 per quarter free access allowance."

[unjapanologist]

That looks awesome. It's just the kind of within-the-law constructive thing that has a really good chance of working. *bookmarks*

Although, does it say anywhere what people can do with their PACER documents once they've downloaded their share? It'll be hard for anyone who needs access to the liberated documents to find what they're looking for unless the whole archive is reconstructed in some kind of free database. Did I miss the mention of that?

[elf]

PlainSite's cases index, linked at the bottom of the page, has the actual files. (Yeah, they're not as obvious as they could be.)

Part of his letter to his congresswoman says

PlainSite (http://www.plainsite.org), operated as a joint venture by Think Computer Corporation and Think Computer Foundation, started off as a personal side-project with a zero-dollar budget. It indexes approximately three-quarters of a million PACER documents, as well as Internal Revenue Service records regarding Section 527 Political Action Committees, among various other related records. PlainSite links disparate data sources in ways that PACER cannot, and was developed within approximately four months by three engineers with freely-available software. Its user interface is vastly superior to that of PACER and CM/ECF, and it further makes this information freely available to the public, either directly or via search engines.

The Judicial Conference should justify to the public why it requires a nine-figure sum of money to operate PACER, when non-profit organizations such as ours are capable of offering better, more modern, and more attractive services for free.

I need to write to 'em and find out if they can use documents not downloaded through their interface.

[unjapanologist]

Ah, PlainSite looks great. And that Firefox extension sounds really, really good - easy to use, with everything automated, and a bunch of extra functionality that genuinely improves the whole PACER experience.

Let me know what they say if you do write them? This sounds like a great example of Things People Can Do. And I really want to poke the OTW's lawyers to see if one of them would want to write a post on how this thing can be used for research on fans and legal issues.

[troisroyaumes]

As far as I'm aware, if researchers funded by NIH do not make their publications publicly accessible for free, they will not be allowed to renew their grants. It's become more or less standard practice to upload any publications with NIH funded research under a paywall to Pubmed Central.

I'm personally interested in the growing movement to release manuscripts on preprint archives; it's already standard practice in physics, math and chemistry, but biology is behind the times. Are there similar movements in the humanities?

[via_ostiense]

Some law journals are moving to being online and free, but it's a journal-by-journal choice.

[unjapanologist]

There are some preprint archives in the humanities, but as far as I'm aware, preprint archiving is not standard and the archives are not well-known. The humanities as a whole tend to lag behind on open access. But there's a very large number of organizations and individuals pushing to change that, and the growing popularity of the very pro-open access digital humanities gives me a lot of hope as well. Perhaps pre-print archiving will become more of a thing in the humanities soon.

Pre-print archiving may be a useful thing we might encourage among fan studies researchers. Hadn't thought of that yet *note to self*

[via_ostiense]

I enjoyed your post; it was thoughtful and interesting.

[unjapanologist]

Glad you liked it!