14 DAY TRIAL // Almost 19,000 digital copies of papers originally published in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society scientific journal were released as a torrent in protest to the recent arrest of a freedom of information activist.
The torrent's author, who identifies himself as Gregory Maxwell, a hobbyist scientist from Northern Virginia and active Wikipedia contributor, says the documents were all published prior to 1923 which means they should technically be in the public domain.
However, that is not the case, because people have to pay fees between $8 to $19 in order to access every one of them, and then only under certain conditions, like for a single month and from a single computer.
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is the world's oldest scientific journal dating back to 1665. All of the issues are in the possession of the Royal Society which makes them available through different paid electronic archives.
"In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete," Maxwell writes.
He explains that scientists are under constant pressure to publish works in scientific journals without pay in order to advance their careers, that peer reviewers are not paid either, and that in some cases not even journal editors earn any money.
"And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy," the protester says. Most of this money goes to publishers who sell distribution rights.
In order to provide access to these scientific works for students and faculty universities sign contracts with electronic archives like JSTOR and even then they can't afford all of them. "The money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models," the scientist says.
Referring to the documents he released on ThePirateBay, he writes that they "are part of the shared heritage of all mankind," especially since the society has already paid for them in full.
Maxwell notes that he originally intended to release these files anonymously, but he then realized the blame might fall on Aaron Swartz, the Stanford researcher and activist arrested for downloading millions of documents from JSTOR.
"This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to," the hobbyist scientist, who commentators are already calling a freedom of information hero, concluded.