The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is a document published by (and widely attributed to) Aaron Swartz in 2008 that argues for transgressive approaches to achieving the goals of the open access movement through civil disobedience, willful violation of copyright and contracts that restrict redistribution of knowledge, and activities that exist in legal grey areas.
The goal of the open access movement taken up by the manifest include the removal of barriers and paywalls that prohibit the general public from accessing scientific research publications and other forms of data. While most of the open access movement has focused on standing up new open access publishers, working with traditional publishers to switch to open access, and organizing scholars who produce and edit articles, these focuses primarily affect the accessible of future publications. The manifesto is largely concerned with the existing proprietary articles and data that are unlikely to be released as open access by the current copyright holders.
The manifesto appears to have been written in 2008 at a meeting of librarians and was subsequently published on Swartz's personal blog.[1] Although the authorship of the document is widely attributed to Swartz, his role in writing the manifesto and the degree to which the manifesto reflected his views, especially several years later, were a contentious issue in United States v. Swartz, the US government's legal proceedings against him several years later.[1] US government prosecutors sought to use the manifesto to argue that Swartz engaged in the mass downloading of articles from JSTOR for the purpose of releasing those articles freely to the public in ways that mirror the manifesto's penultimate sentence saying, "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks."[1]
- ^ a b c Swartz, Aaron (2015). The boy who could change the world: the writings of Aaron Swartz. New York : Distributed by Perseus Distribution: The New Press. ISBN 978-1-62097-066-9.