Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

The ''Guerilla Open Access Manifesto'' is a document published by (and widely attributed to) Aaron Swartz in 2008 that argues for transgressive approaches to achieving the goals of the open access movement through civil disobedience, willful violation of copyright and contracts that restrict redistribution of knowledge, and activities that exist in legal grey areas.

The goal of the open access movement taken up by the manifesto include the removal of barriers and paywalls that prohibit the general public from accessing scientific research publications and other forms of data. While most of the open access movement has focused on standing up new open access publishers, working with traditional publishers to switch to open access, and organizing scholars who produce and edit articles, these focuses primarily affect the accessibility of future publications. The manifesto is largely concerned with the existing proprietary articles and data that are unlikely to be released as open access by the current copyright holders.

The manifesto appears to have been written in 2008 at a meeting of librarians and was subsequently published on Swartz's personal blog. Although the authorship of the document is widely attributed to Swartz, his role in writing the manifesto and the degree to which the manifesto reflected his views, especially several years later, were a contentious issue in '' United States v. Swartz,'' the US government's legal proceedings against him several years later. US government prosecutors sought to use the manifesto to argue that Swartz engaged in the mass downloading of articles from JSTOR for the purpose of releasing those articles freely to the public in ways that mirror the manifesto's penultimate sentence saying, "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks."

Background and context

Prior to the publication of the ''Manifesto'', Swartz had been active in the open source software, free culture, and the open access movements, such as working as an early contributor to Creative Commons, a web organization devoted to ensuring open access to a variety of different what would have otherwise been copyrighted materials. Other work includes his early programming contributions to Open Library, an organization attempting to create a comprehensive online library containing information on every book. Months before publishing the ''Manifesto'', in 2008, Swartz worked to make thousands of federal court documents from the PACER electronic document systems available to public for free.

Analysis of content

The manifesto opens with the statement that "Information is Power", and makes the case that access to knowledge is a human right. It focuses on the availability of scientific and scholarly work online, and argues for the importance of making scholarly work widely available, along with removing existing barriers to access. The ''Manifesto'' identifies restrictions to information availability as a serious problem facing both the academic community and the world at large, and criticizes both the copyright laws that have led to paywalls, along with the corporate influences and perceived greed that have supported the development of legislature supporting this. The ''Manifesto'' mentions one publisher by name: Reed Elsevier, a publisher whose articles covering a breadth of topics are hidden behind a paywall, which the author condemns as unethical. The manifesto frames one of the goals of the Open Access movement as ensuring that academics publishing their work can make it available to everyone and not be hindered by these restrictions. Additionally, the manifesto addresses the role of privilege in impacting who does and does not have access to many of these information repositories, calling attention to existing socioeconomic divides that contribute to these inequities in information availability. The ''Manifesto'' serves as a call to action, and argues that making scholarly information widely available online is a moral imperative. In order to do so, it advocates for proponents of open access to engage in civil disobedience and condones the violation of copyright law in order to make scholarly work widely available.

Repercussions and impact

The open access manifesto played an important role in United States v. Swartz. In the case, the US government claimed that Swartz had violated federal laws by downloading large number of academic articles from the JSTOR academic article storage systems via the open MIT computer network. In 2013, the U.S. Secret Service released a portion of their almost 15,000 page file on Swartz, detailing their investigation of his home and chronicling the questions asked of him about the Manifesto's "human rights" applications. Swartz was facing up to 50 years in prison if found guilty of the charges against him, and remained under investigation until his eventual suicide in 2013.

Some activists claim that Swartz was unsuccessful in achieving the specific goals he outlined in his ''Manifesto.'' The JSTOR collection acquired by Swartz was never released to public domain. Moreover, other open access activists have spoken out against the illegal activities the ''Manifesto'' called for as counterproductive to the movement's aims. In general, open access approaches have advocated for the liberation of scholarly information through legal means. Some critics of the GOA movement claim to support civil disobedience, but do not support the specific tactics called for in the manifesto. They believe the responsibility to change belongs to policymakers and scientists.

However, the symbolic ideas Swartz introduced through his ''Manifesto'' were effective in incentivizing others to take up the mantle of the open access (OA) movement. Today, many sites that once used paywalls are freely available thanks to the actions of OA activists following in Swartz's footsteps. One such activist, Alexandra Elbakyan, furthered Swartz's mission by developing an online repository she dubbed " Sci-Hub" that provides free access to over 74 million scientific journal articles. Elbakyan has been identified as a Guerilla Open Access (GOA) activist because of the transgressive and illegal practices she engages in.

The Text of the Manifesto

Source:

See also

* Anna's Archive

External links

* The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto on the Internet Archive

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Guerilla_Open_Access_Manifesto
Open access projects
Open access (publishing)