Create guerillaopenaccess

guerillaopenaccess

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+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. 
+
+There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought 
+valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure 
+their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But 
+even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. 
+Everything up until now will have been lost. 
+
+That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their 
+colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? 
+Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to 
+children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable. 
+
+"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they 
+make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — 
+there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's 
+already being done: we can fight back. 
+
+Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been 
+given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world 
+is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for 
+yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords 
+with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. 
+
+
+
+Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been 
+sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by 
+the publishers and sharing them with your friends. 
+
+But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or 
+piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a 
+ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only 
+those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy. 
+
+Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate 
+require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they 
+have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who 
+can make copies. 
+
+There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the 
+grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public 
+culture. 
+
+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? 
+
+Aaron Swartz 
+
+July 2008, Eremo, Italy 
+