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....
Aaron Swartz was a giant and a hero.
He wrote Guerrilla Open Access and founded theinfo.org. His personal website can be found here:
http://www.aaronsw.com/
This was a magazine about academia which seems interesting and ran from 1990 to 2001.
I found out about it listening to the Longform episode with Masha Gessen who wrote for it at one point.
Interestingly, Aaron Swartz pulled it into a mirror archive when he was 19 in December 2005 which is availible here:
http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/ This was how I discovered https://theinfo.org.
https://theinfo.org/ This is a very interesting website. It appears to have been dormant since 2008, but was started by Aaron Swartz (author of Guerrilla Open Access) and has a fair amount of interesting stuff on it.
The opening line says:
This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them....