Agree completely. By all accounts he was a bright guy, bu he did something very foolish. He did a crime and rather than play ball he martyred himself. Yes there probably was prosecutorial overreach and yes our criminal justice system could use reform. But this guy was no saint in the matter and could have easily got off with a minor sentence.
So you think Rosa Parks was also a criminal for having the foolishness to refuse to give up her seat for a white?
Breaking immoral laws is a sign of being a hero, not a criminal. Unfortunately the monied interests were more powerful than a brilliant kid, so we have to live in a world without Aaron Swartz but with rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.
You know who’s to blame for scientific publishing? Fucking academia. The web was built to allow research papers to be shared. Seriously - it’s fucking purpose built for that very task.
There are no resources involved in scientific publishing besides the time of the authors and reviewers, none of whom are employed by the publishers.
So why do we have any academic publishers at all, over 30 years after the web was invented? Surely we could have solved the problems with organizing peer review, etc by now. The answer is: academia wants it to be this way. Researchers want to publish in prestige journals. The cred from prestige journals is integral to the academic career path in enough disciplines that the system is allowed to self perpetuate.
The cred isn’t to stroke a researcher’s ego, it’s because the alternative is to not get to do any research. Or to not have access to research institutes. Or to not eat. Privileged researchers in areas that aren’t as affected by this problem (eg. compsci) can afford to publish on Arxiv, but others aren’t so fortunate.
Publish(-in-prestiguous-journals)-or-perish is real, and the for-profit journal system is a parasite profiting from it. Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research - but good luck speaking out against that.
What is the alternative to prestigious journals? Each scientist should read all of the papers published in their field every day?
The work of curating a journal for various metrics (subject matter, standards of peer review, impact etc.) is crucial to the everyday working of science. This doesn't mean that a few for profit corporations should get to extract profit from it, but it also doesn't mean that academia should give up the whole idea and just read all of scihub or arxiv to make up their own minds.
> Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research
This is an unsupported declarative statement, and I view the evidence as pointing in the opposite direction. For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.
A good portion of the economics has nothing whatsoever to do with private enterprise, and instead involves academic career paths and grant applications, often to non-profit or government grantors.
Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access. Would that change the fundamental economics in a meaningful way? The money to pay researchers is not coming from publishers.
> For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.
They are filling a need they created and maintain themselves. Publishers with extremely deep pockets bought out prestigious non-profit journals [1], turning an inelastic market (originating from the value of peer-reviewed journals in a pre-Internet era) into an oligopoly that continued to raise prices as much as possible. No extra need was filled by the takeover, no value was provided, only more profit was extracted because it was economically possible. Now, this profit is used to fund the continued existence of this need, by lobbying against any effort to remove this need. It makes perfect sense economically, but is plainly detrimental to society and is at a stage that makes any gradual change very difficult.
> Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access.
This sort of thought experiment is meaningless as any kind of proof because it doesn't consider the complexity of the human element. Academic researchers aren't perfectly rational units independent from any other system, like the simple fact of having to pay rent to live and that rent being available from this month's paycheck, and that paycheck being dependent on continued employment whose loss would likely take months to resolve. You're only demonstrating that if we lived in some abstract, perfect world, some problems would solve themselves. But in that same abstract, perfect world that problem likely wouldn't even manifest in the first place. So what are you really proving?
Rosa Parks committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Rosa Parks is considered a hero because she stood up against an unjust law KNOWING that she was going to be prosecuted for her actions.
Aaron Swartz committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Swartz believed that his internet status and his MIT association would shield him from the consequences of his action, and he killed himself when he realized he was going to be treated like a nobody and subjected to the same sorts of prosecutorial pressure that affects thousands of Americans every day.
He was no hero, and it's frankly ridiculous and demeaning to the memory of Rosa Parks and what she went through to use her life story to prop him up. The US Civil Rights movement is one where people took actions that they KNEW were illegal partly because they knew how bad the optics would be. Famous Civl Rights leaders used the after-release press conferences as pulpits to preach their sermons of racial equality.
You’re seriously comparing Aaron Swartz to Rosa Parks?
Mental illness needs to be destigmatized, and access to treatment is imperative. Aaron’s death was a tragedy, and the government was engaged in serious prosecutorial overreach.
But, Rosa Parks? Seriously now? Aaron was engaged in a puerile “hack” that spun out of control when the school and feds got involved.
The hagiography around this poor guy is nauseating sometimes.
Rosa Parks was involved with stubbornly giving up her seat in the front of the colored section for a white woman, which "spun out of control when the feds got involved" but like Swartz she pushed her way through the Justice system to challenge unfair laws. Segregation was obviously more disgusting, but I don't like the idea that activists of the past are incomparable saintlike figures, especially when they were extremely contentious for their time. I'm sure plenty of people said that Parks was being "puerile" at the time and should have just given up her seat instead of making it an issue, but sometimes making something an issue is the only way to create an opportunity for progress.
