On Sun, Apr 9, 2017 at 10:17 PM, Keith Lofstrom <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I watched "The Internet's Own Boy" about Aaron Swartz a few
> days ago.  Wonderful motivation: make academic literature
> publically accessable.  Stupid juvenile implementation:
> download a million papers from JSTOR in an MIT wiring
> closet.  Horrible outcome: Federal prosecution, suicide.

He was apparently also stealing the *organization* and layout of the
content, including the descriptions of the papers. *That* is new
analysis material, copyrightable by JSTOR.

> I want to make the information contained in academic
> literature publically accessable ... and versioned, and
> updated, and weblinked, and supported.  The academics
> here might have some ideas.

Use JSTOR. It's a paid service, but it's a non-profit and very
generous with grants and generous about clients who share access. Like
paying a janitor clean the bathrooms, it's a modest fee, for an
*amazingly* useful service. If you can help raise the money to get
their very good services in all pubic libraries.... Oh, wait!!! It is,
in many hundreds if not thousands of libraries across the land? JSTOR
gives *amazing* discounts for libraries. the infrastructure and time
to organize it is large, and not cheap.

> What if:  We (meaning those more capable than me) construct
> a software environment for disassembing the pdf elements of
> an academic paper, which a moderately literate person can
> use to REWRITE and redraw and reformat the paper as a
> substantially different work with an updated version of
> the same information in it?  I am inspired by some of the
> capabilities in Inkscape for reworking graphics into SVG.
>
> What if we improve that process, for example tying a graph
> in an old paper to data from new research that verifies,
> refines, or refutes it?  Move the slider on the graph from
> an original 1960 paper to a new graph that incorporates
> 2017 data?

I'm skeptical you can do this well enough, with a specialized enough
set of tools to make it worth it. It's a "Computer Aided Design", or
CAD project. And those rarely get enough membership to do well.

Your best bet for free is to print the original content as PDF's, and
apply either ImageMagick (for free) or Adobe PDFCreator (for a good
commercial editing tool).

> I have about a dozen published journal papers out there
> (one with over 200 citations) that I would love to
> "de-copyright" out of the clutches of the IEEE, Elsevier,
> etc.  My newest stuff is publically posted as pre-
> publication drafts before I submit it, but I would love
> simple tools that would ease the process of liberating
> my older work.  I'd be glad to help as an alpha-test
> guinea pig, also use the tool for new writing projects.

See above. What I

> ... and an open, updatable, friendly version of the
> document that 99% of the world will actually use.
> Personally, I would love it if my best papers outlived
> me by centuries, steadily improving and accumulating
> hundreds of coauthors into the far future.

Then I hope they were *really, really good* and worth spending the
time on. It seems unlikely.

> While this would be a very complicated suite of tools to
> write, it's gotta be a lot easier than designing rockets
> and self-driving cars.
>
> Am I nuts?
>
> Keith

You're nuts. There's little to no short term return on the investment,
none of which you've actually done, and to compete with tools which
exist. TeX, and LaTeX, tried to do this and the gui LyX eventually
evolved to help with it. But it relied on TeX formatting, which was
overwhelmingly discarded as Word took over document writing, and PDF
took over stabilization of printable documents. Also, the "we need to
spend all our time picking the unique font for *our* institution's
publications!!!" nuttiness became a compatibility nightmare.

Most of the documents you refer to can be printed out as editable,
consuming PDF, including what is at JSTOR and almost all the modern
on-line published scientific literature today. If you'd like to invest
the work, or gather support, I'd urge working with and improving PDF
editing tools. And if co-authors are going to edit and modify, you're
going to *need* to trace provenance, and come to grips with copyright
law. Those are better places, I think, to spend the effort to make
shared scientific compilation feasible. If I see such a paper, I want
to know which person did the original research and what bozo added the
parts about breeding mammoths inside of female elephants.

In fact, for good scientific provenance, I *don't* want editing after
Footnotes by others, or a side-by-side guide like a Cliff's Notes?
Those have uses. But leave the original language and wording
*alone*!!!

Endearingly optimistic, and if you can get traction on it, cool. But
you don't get much traction on the many thousands of "wouldn't it be
nice" ideas if you don't actually sit down and write the code, or
spend the money to get someone else competent to write it.

> --
> Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]