We believe that MIT should have issued a statement criticizing the excessively harsh charges against Aaron in light of the following facts:

1.  Aaron’s use of MIT’s open network to gain access to JSTOR articles through MIT’s journal subscription was legal. At worst, his use of a computer script to automate downloading of 4.8 million articles violated JSTOR’s terms of use, for which he was not charged [2].

2. Aaron never distributed any of these articles to the public. In fact, he returned all copies of the downloads and promised not to share them once he was arrested [3].

3. JSTOR stated that it had no interest in pursuing civil litigation against Aaron [4] and asked for the criminal litigation to be dropped.

Aaron was a social activist, supporter of open access to knowledge, and friend to many in the MIT community. We are saddened to learn of his death and supportive of his family and partner’s criticism of MIT’s inaction against “a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach” [5].

[1] http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.html
[2] http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-suicide1
[4] http://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-statement-misuse-incident-and-criminal-case
[5] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/01/official_statement.php

[Edit: A couple people have pointed out that President Reif has issued a letter announcing the start of an internal investigation into MIT's involvement with Aaron's case, which we appreciate. We do not ask for an apology before the internal investigation is over, but we do wish to communicate our opinion that anything less than an apology as a result of the investigation is unacceptable in light of the facts stated above.]

[Disclaimer: This author of this post does not claim to represent the views of the MIT Society for Open Science as a group.]

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From: “L. Rafael Reif”
Date: Jan 13, 2013 4:15 PM
Subject: Aaron Swartz
To:
Cc:

To the members of the MIT community:

Yesterday we received the shocking and terrible news that on Friday in New York, Aaron Swartz, a gifted young man well known and admired by many in the MIT community, took his own life. With this tragedy, his family and his friends suffered an inexpressible loss, and we offer our most profound condolences. Even for those of us who did not know Aaron, the trail of his brief life shines with his brilliant creativity and idealism.

Although Aaron had no formal affiliation with MIT, I am writing to you now because he was beloved by many members of our community and because MIT played a role in the legal struggles that began for him in 2011.

I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.

I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it.

I hope we will all reach out to those members of our community we know who may have been affected by Aaron’s death. As always, MIT Medical is available to provide expert counseling, but there is no substitute for personal understanding and support.

With sorrow and deep sympathy,

L. Rafael Reif

A few days ago, I and the rest of MIT SPS went to see the play “Photograph 51″. It details [and dramatizes] the life and work of Rosalind Franklin, who was the first to see the helical nature of DNA. For all her professional life (which tragically ended rather early due to ovarian cancer), she worked extremely methodically and refused to draw any conclusions or make any models unless there was solid data to support that. By contrast, Crick & Watson, who are traditionally the ones credited with discovering the structure and nature of DNA, went for models even if there wasn’t always the most solid evidence to support them. What they did do that Franklin did not (according to the play, at least, which I believe and hope is pretty close to what actually happened) was to model how DNA base-pairing works and where the phosphates are in the nucleic acids.

One of the things that struck me as interesting is just how isolated Franklin made herself even from her colleagues at the King’s College in London. I mean, I knew that she was generally reluctant to share her work because she knew that any work she published would be attributed to her male colleagues (even those under her in the research hierarchy), but I didn’t realize she was practically antagonistic toward her fellow researchers. I fully understand how she did so essentially to maintain her own dignity and not submit herself to the male-dominated research community, but if she tried that today in a culture where females are quite prevalent (though of course there is still much progress to be made) in scientific research, I would think her actions would be unacceptable as they would be antithetical to the ideas of open science and collaborative research.

On the other hand, though, it’s hard to discount just how pervasive the sexism present at that time was. Crick & Watson in the play were both quite patronizing toward her. Her colleague Maurice Wilkins could not really accept her as an equal until around the time when she first fell ill with ovarian cancer. She was segregated from the other male researchers. So of course she had to do everything she could to make sure she would be recognized as an equal to the other researchers rather than as an assistant of some sort.

There’s another point to be made regarding open science in this context, and that is in the premature publication of Franklin’s data. She didn’t want to publish because she felt that she didn’t have sufficient data to back up any claims she made (and this is also why she was opposed to making models as prematurely as Crick & Watson did). Ultimately, it should have been left to her as to whether she wanted to publish the data or not. Yet Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were overeager to publish and “win the race” (to finding the “secret to life”), so they managed to get a hold of one of Franklin’s photographs without her permission and used it to complete their own work. Consequently, she didn’t make it onto their Nobel Prize-winning paper, so the paper she published looked like it simply supported the paper from Crick & Watson. A lot of accounts describe the process as them “stealing” her data. On the one hand, I disagree with this because ultimately it is the results that matter to science more than the personalities behind them. On the other hand, they did acquire that data without her permission, and in the end it should have been up to her whether her own data should have been published or not. There wasn’t any doubt that she would publish everything once she got around to it; it’s just that she felt that the time wasn’t right, and the other researchers violated her prerogative as a research scientist to make that call.

As I think about this more, the whole story really is a good deal more ethically knotty than how it is initially presented. Also, I would encourage you to go and see the play “Photograph 51″ if you are in the Boston area; it is playing in the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

I remember reading about Citizendium a few years ago, and how it aimed to challenge Wikipedia and especially challenge Wikipedia’s liabilities of how anonymous and often incorrect edits of articles would frequently go unchallenged. Since then, Citizendium has gotten…twelve thousand articles. That’s less than 1% of Wikipedia’s English-language articles (to say nothing of Wikipedia’s article collection in other languages). So why did Citizendium fail so massively?

I think there were two factors at play. The first is that as Wikipedia got more regular and registered editors, misinformation and bias became much less problematic than they were a few years ago. That means the incentive for people to turn to sites like Citizendium and Knol, which tried to offer value through non-anonymous, expert-signed editing, went away. If you think about it, now more than ever, news organizations and other big names turn to Wikipedia for information without a second thought. That just goes to show how much better Wikipedia has become over the last few years.

But what else happened? The second issue has to do with what Michael Nielsen talked about at MIT, and I think I’m reaching the same conclusion as him (considering that unless I’m hallucinating, I do believe he specifically mentioned Citizendium by name). The issue is that Citizendium didn’t align incentives properly. It was a great, noble goal to try to gain users by promising good-quality non-anonymously-edited articles, but to do that it would have to give authors incentives to start contributing to Citizendium rather than Wikipedia. Yet it did just the opposite: there were no financial or other incentives other than the possibility of having one’s name attached to an article, yet the costs were high in that trying to get things published became quite difficult. Contrary to Wikipedia, which allows for easy, one-click anonymous editing, Citizendium required editors to register, and I would say that generally speaking, people don’t like registering for one more site that they may or may not ever use. I think Michael Nielsen said this too, and this is also why so many online scientific publishing social networks have flopped too. In addition, Wikipedia allows authors to see immediate results from their edits; Citizendium requires a review process, which is great for quality, but it means that authors are really taking a gamble on whether their articles will be published or not, and what’s the point of taking such a gamble when there’s the certainty of Wikipedia?

I don’t really have a reason for writing this. I just felt like it and wanted to procrastinate slightly on studying.

I did it today yesterday! Woot! (And I got a picture with him!) Although he is specifically a physicist, most well known for his seminal textbook on quantum computing, he came to give a colloquium about open science in general, and it’s doubly cool for me because I’m interested in both physics and things like open science. (Also, before the talk, I mentioned to him that I first read about him on Glyn Moody’s blog, which you should totally read. That’s how Dr. Nielsen figured out I’m a free software kind of guy. He also told me that Mr. Moody’s a cool guy too.)

He talked about stuff like the development of Linux and Wikipedia through crowdsourcing, but he also discussed failures like the innumerable abandoned technical wikis intended to attract the best researchers in that field that litter the web. He also discussed how scientists’ conservatism regarding releasing data openly dates back many centuries, when 200 years after the introduction of the printing press in Europe, scientists in Europe were still reluctant to release their work in print. He took that to today and how that conservatism negatively affects research progress, along with what some people have done to combat it, and in the spirit of the talk, he opened the floor to questions and also to discussion about how individual scientists can promote and do open science.

I was able to ask him a question about one thing he said about Galileo: apparently, Galileo was concerned about other people getting credit for doing the same work as him independently of him, so he only “published” his work by sending a few select other scientists his work, but scrambled into anagrams unreadable at first sight. Then, if those scientists tried to publish similar work independently, he would be able to pull out the unscrambled manuscripts and prove that he came up with those ideas first. I asked him if the scrambling was really done for that purpose, given that Galileo published his work about a heliocentric universe in vernacular Italian, as opposed to the scholarly Latin, specifically to reach the masses (and that’s what got him the undue attention of the Roman Catholic Church). Dr. Nielsen replied that while that might be the case, it is clear that his intent with those scrambled letters was to ensure that credit would go to himself first, as Johannes Kepler actually begged Galileo to tell him the unscrambled message, and Galileo refused until Kepler’s patron (the Holy Roman Emperor) got into the act too. It was interesting for me to hear about these two sides of Galileo. I was going to also ask him how gene patenting squared with the Bermuda Accords, which were codified into policy by many countries to force scientists to release sequenced genomes into the public domain if said sequences were more than 1000 base pairs long. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to ask him that.

(UPDATE: I was also lucky enough to be picked (among about 7-8 other people) to chat with him over lunch today! Yay! Our conversation started with the question of how to get people to truly trust what scientists are telling them, because unless everyone is an expert in every field that gets featured on the news, at some point some level of trust and faith in the verity of what scientists say is unfortunately required. Plus, it’s no good if scientists become like fundamentalist preachers standing at the front of the room as a so-called authority dictating how people should think. I think the consensus regarding outreach in this sense is really to start with getting young kids into science, and to plant seeds of curiosity and critical thinking in people in different cities and towns, because people will probably be more open and receptive to scientific ideas if they come from the mouths of their neighbors as opposed to the mouths of outsiders.

The conversation then shifted to other random stuff, including sports, movies, and the recent discovery of neutrinos that travel faster than light through the Earth’s innards (but still slower than light in a vacuum). I was able to also ask the question about gene patenting versus the Bermuda Accords, and Dr. Nielsen admitted that his understanding of gene patents was only marginally better than that of a layperson and that he didn’t really know what to say about it, aside from the fact that the Accords only seem to apply to sequences of already-existing DNA. Additionally, I asked him how people getting into academia who do not yet have tenure (and the associated very high job security) could practice more open science. He conceded that he really is advocating for more thorough, comprehensive reform on the part of scientists and journals; he reminded me of how yesterday he discussed how only the most cutting-edge (in terms of making the most use of new technologies) journals accept things like YouTube videos, despite the fact that many times, it is almost trivially easy to show in a video what is otherwise almost impossible to clearly write in a paper. He said that individual scientists should publish in open-access journals if said journals exist in the field and if they are of the same quality and have the same quality standards as closed-access counterparts; in addition, if scientists truly believe that things like computer code that they write will be very widely used, they should open that code into the public domain, but asking scientists to open-source everything would be too much and, perhaps, sometimes unwise in and of itself.

The conversations I was able to have with him before and during his colloquium talk and during this lunch were incredibly satisfying and intellectually stimulating, and it makes me so glad that I’m here right now!)

We seek to develop a framework that will enable access to active peer review to researchers in countries which may have developed educational systems but lack developed academic cultures or other research environments. In the long run, this project addresses the absence of thriving scientific communities in foreign countries due to migration of educated scientists to the U.S. Therefore, we hope to export the MIT environment elsewhere such that quality of research is determined by quality of ideas, not by quantity of capital.

Our goal is to make it easier and cheaper for researchers to communicate their work and receive useful feedback by building a web framework that allows users to peer review, translate, and collaborate on papers while hosting easy-to-maintain home pages for research projects. Thus, we reduce the costs associated with maintaining group web pages and servers, traveling to conferences, preparing for journal publication, garnering publicity, and other tasks that put scientists without funding, web expertise, English skills, and administrative assistance at a severe disadvantage.

Well, it had a good run. The project never grew its wings and got off the ground like a pig on Red Bull, but we did have some intense late-night discussions and a couple of viable ideas. I’m still a huge fan of the implementation sketch in the second paragraph, to be honest, and I’m convinced it has some promise as a future MITSOS project.

And then there was this: while Googling for efforts similar to ours, we hit upon the open science movement via Michael Nielsen’s blog and experienced an instant intellectual limerence for him. This post especially was a huge inspiration. By “huge inspiration”, I meant to say that we basically decided to start a student group based on the last couple of paragraphs.

And the rest is still to come.

We also have some interest in creating software and web tools to facilitate scientific collaboration, so please feel free to suggest projects.

The group discussion list is open-science[AT]mit.edu. To join, blanche yourself or email open-science-request[AT]mit.edu.