1.9 KiB
| title |
|---|
| Guerilla Open Access Manifesto |
In 2008 Aaron Swartz wrote in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto:
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier… We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Heeding Aaron Swartz’s call to civil disobedience, guerilla open access as a practice of sharing books and articles has emerged out of the outrage over digitally-enabled enclosure of knowledge that has allowed for-profit academic publishers to appropriate extreme profits that stand in stark contrast to the cuts, precarity, student debt and asymmetries of access in education. Although guerilla open access is organised through communication platforms such as email, forums, Facebook (Ask for PDFs people with institutional Access) and Twitter (#ICanHazPDF), its principal infrastructure are the shadow libraries, most notably Library Genesis, Science Hub, Z-library, Aaaaarg.fail, Ubuweb, Monoskop and Memory of the World. Shadow libraries provide the decommodified access to knowledge and culture that public libraries have always provided in the world of print yet were denied the world of digital text.