Policy aligning with the legacy of Aaron Swartz

My career has intertwined with academic research several times; I was a co-author of several publications and managed to produce a few as first author as well. It always amazed me how much effort goes into publishing a paper. A huge effort goes into writing the first version (which already undergoes several internal revisions) submitted to peer review, but the real hard work is satisfying all the reviewers. The latter step sometimes results in revising almost every line of a publication, practically rewriting it. The tediousness of this process promotes higher quality. (Nothing is perfect, but science always strives for quality.)

At the same time, during research, one often reads other publications, and unless someone is part of an academic institution, that can be costly. Journals often keep publications behind paywalls. The peer review process, for example, requires a lot of time not just from the authors, but from the peer reviewers as well. Reviewers can spend many hours meticulously going through a manuscript so they can make suggestions for improvements. Interestingly, however, the peer reviewers do not get paid for that (as far as I have seen), performing their services pro bono on a volunteer basis.

So the peer reviewers don’t get paid, and most of the time research projects are funded by grants backed essentially by taxpayer money. Various scientific organizations such as the NSF or NIH are heavily government-funded. So the question arises: if the entire research project was covered by taxpayer money and the peer reviewers aren’t paid either, then what is up with all of those paywalls? If you are a member of a university or academic organization, you may not see paywalls because your institution pays tens of thousands of dollars for subscriptions to journals.

Aaron Swartz was a brilliant computer programmer and progressive activist, and during his time at MIT, he found it unreasonable for taxpayer-funded documents not to be freely available. When talking about scientific publications, their results can benefit humankind and accelerate further research. Aaron ended up using his skills to download documents—which should have been freely available via such reasoning—and made them accessible to everyone.

His actions drew the attention of the FBI and the Secret Service; he was slapped with a massive federal indictment in 2011. Often, even violent criminals do not face the prospect of 50 years of imprisonment and a $1 million fine. Unfortunately, the mounting pressure of the legal battle proved to be too great, and Aaron committed suicide in 2013. One documentary worth watching is “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz”, with a very high rating on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes.

The reason I am writing this post is that the White House finally banned paywalls on taxpayer-funded research. Aaron Swartz’s death was a huge loss, but his activism was not in vain after all. A few thoughts from ExtremeTech’s post on the topic:

• “Under the new policy, research performed with federal dollars must be made public on the same day it appears in a scientific journal.”
• “For a college or university, even the bare minimum of journal subscriptions can add up to thousands of dollars a year, which is a hard sell on a limited budget.”
• The publications in question “already got government funding because it was in the public interest”.