It seems a little early to be jumping to the conclusion that this is either civil disobedience for its own sake, or an attempt to redistribute non-open-access papers, given his publishing history:
"In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption." (http://demandprogress.org/aaron) ie. he has a history of published research on topics which actually need this kind of volume of papers as raw data. Graham On 07/21/11 12:33, Peter Murray-Rust wrote: > I have blogged my personal thoughts. > > http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/07/20/the-ethics-of-%E2%80%9Cstealing%E2%80%9D-scientific-articles-and-civil-disobedience/ > > If (and I am not sure whether it is till we have more info - perhaps in > the trial) this is an act of civil disobedience - there can be merit in > it. If it is Guerilla OA (as I believe he earlier indulged in) then I > think that is outside the OKF's remit and practice. The OKF is not a > lobbying organization and should also not support deliberate law > breaking at this time. > > We are - as we are reminded at OKCon's and elsewhere - in the middle of > a major battle for our future information world. What I think the OKF > does best is to define where we want to be. There are certainly > different ways of getting there. At present I think OKF benefits from > having a community where a number of other players (government > particularly, but also early Open adopters in the publishing community, > such as BMC's adoption of the Panton Principles). > > This does not mean that we cannot personally adopt a wide range of views > about Swartz, but I don't think this maps onto OKF activities. > > P. > > -- > Peter Murray-Rust > Reader in Molecular Informatics > Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry > University of Cambridge > CB2 1EW, UK > +44-1223-763069 > > > > _______________________________________________ > okfn-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
