Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
TRANSCRIPT
NEAL CONAN, HOST:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan.
And
now the Opinion Page. The release of millions of academic papers by
Internet activist Aaron Swartz raised many questions about how much
access the public should have to scholarship, questions that took on new
dimensions after his suicide. At the time of his death, Swartz faced
federal charges of wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act.
In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Ludlow
argues Aaron Swartz was right, not only justified in his act of civil
disobedience, but morally impelled to act. We want to hear from those of
you in academic publishing, what's the legacy of Aaron Swartz?
800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on
our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION.
Peter
Ludlow is a professor of philosophy in Northwestern University. His
commentary "Aaron Swartz Was Right" ran in The Chronicle of Higher Ed on
February 25. He joins us now from member station WBEZ in Chicago. Good
to have you with us today.
PETER LUDLOW: Hi. Good afternoon.
CONAN:
And you write that the consensus, so far, is that Swartz did something
wrong. And, well, he himself called it an act of civil disobedience.
Don't people who commit act of civil disobedience expect some - well,
there are some risks associated with that.
LUDLOW: There
certainly are. When you commit an act of civil disobedience, you're
doing something that is technically against the law, but you believe
it's the right thing to do. For example, Rosa Parks knew that it was
against the law to sit in the front of the bus, but she did so anyway.
And that's basically the structure of acts of civil disobedience.
CONAN: Yet, you accept that there's a possibility you could end up facing charges for this.
LUDLOW: You certainly do.
CONAN: And the civil act that he committed, you say, was justified by the, well, peculiar structure of academic publishing.
LUDLOW:
Yeah. There are actually two things going on here. One is the issue of
academic publishing, the structure of it and how knowledge is locked up
by academic publishers. And then there's another thing which you're
somewhat alluding to earlier when you talk about, you know, he should
have expected some sort of punishment for what he did. And that other
thing goes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which lays out these
draconian penalties for unauthorized access of a computer system. And so
there are really two things going on in all of this. One has to do with
the story about academic publishing, and the other thing has to do with
this Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and both are incredibly serious
issues.
CONAN: Well, let us start with the academic publishing issue then, first. And...
LUDLOW: Sounds fair.
CONAN:
All right. And your argument, essentially, that this has been stood on
its head, a system that was designed to disseminate information instead
bottles it up.
LUDLOW: That's exactly right. If you think about
what academic publishers used to do is that they could provide a
service that nobody else could provide. That is, they could produce
information. They could typeset papers, scientific papers, mathematical
papers, and so forth, in a way that nobody else really could do because,
you know, a century ago, we're writing these things, you know, with
pencil or pen. And they could not only typeset them, but they could
publish the - and they could distribute them. And so it played this
really invaluable service of taking information that otherwise might
just be circulated among a very small group, and distribute it
worldwide.
But now, it's performing exactly the opposite
function. Instead of helping us to distribute information, it's using a
certain kind of rights that it's acquired. And it's using that to bottle
up information and demand for fees for that information when there are
much more efficient ways to distribute information and academic
publishing - academic ideas these days.
CONAN: Well, one of the problems you cite is that very few papers actually do get published, five percent you estimate.
LUDLOW:
Well, that's - if you would take a particular top-level philosophy
journal, their acceptance rate is around five percent. So presumably,
those papers get published elsewhere, but perhaps not a journal that's
as prestigious.
And the problem is that if you're a junior
professor somewhere, let's say you're a junior professor in philosophy,
you need to publish or perish. That means you don't have tenure yet.
You're going to need to show up with, you know, six, seven, eight, maybe
10 solid publications in order to get tenure, or you're out the door.
And you submit your papers to these journals.
They have a 5
percent acceptance rate and they are not - they are going to, basically,
have you sign over the right to that publication. That is, a junior
professor is going to be at a very unfair bargaining position, where
they're going to give up the rights to their own intellectual product to
this publishing company simply because, you know, they're in an
impossible situation. They have to publish. They don't have many
opportunities, and the publishing company holds all the power.
CONAN: So they've got 'em over a barrel and, of course, they're going to, given those stakes, sign away their right.
LUDLOW: Sure. I mean, I did it when I was young.
(LAUGHTER)
LUDLOW:
I needed, I needed tenure. I signed away my rights. And I think for
most publications and most fields in academia, the scholars do end up
signing away their rights.
CONAN: And then you have the
situation then to get access to those papers, subsequently, those
publishers demand fees, and this is often for research that's been
funded by, well, federal money.
LUDLOW: It could be funded by
the NEH or the NSF. It might be funded by your tuition dollars or by
state - money that a state contributes to the state university. And
often, the research is the product of public funding. But the public
doesn't have access to that information unless it finds some route to it
by being a student in a university or professor in the university or
via some other, not necessarily so obvious, route of access to the
information.
CONAN: Now, there are various regulations, laws, written to protect, effectively, monopoly of these publishers.
READ MORE
