R.I.P. Aaron Swartz - JSTOR archive 35GB (THIS IS NOT AARON'S ACTUAL ARCHIVE)

UPDATE:

An anonymous commenter has made a script to read the metadata (which contains meaningful titles for the articles). It can be found here :

https://bitbucket.org/smurrell/jstorsearch/downloads

I can offer no support for this script.



Also, there is a complaint that this is not Aaron's actual archive.

OK. I thought I had made that clear in the description. This was posted as a sort of "in memoriam". I had tried to indicate that with the R.I.P. (Rest In Peace). Anyway, I have changed the title to be more clear.About the contents:

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Here are over 18,000 articles from the JSTOR archive. These articles are from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. They are all old enough to be out of copyright. Mostly, they are only of historical interest. These are not from the 4,000,000+ articles that Aaron downloaded. He surrendered all of that when he was arrested. These articles come from another (allegedly legal) source, and were released when Aaron was indicted in July, 2011 -- in the spirit of solidarity. At the time of Aaron's arrest, JSTOR charged between 9-18$ for each article. After Aaron's arrest, JSTOR made these articles available for free (subject to some restrictions).



Now, I'm not a big fan of JSTOR, but it should be mentioned that they declined to press criminal or civil charges. It was the government that insisted on going overboard on this one.



About the format:

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There are a bunch of compressed files, 7zip format. It looks like 10.7z is missing, but that's okay. Each file is independent of the other. The filenames are just numbers -- nothing meaningful. That makes this pretty useless as a research tool -- at least for now. Each PDF file has a corresponding metadata file. The metadata file contains the article name of the corresponding PDF file. You can still open up the PDFs and look at them, but you won't have any idea what you're going to find until you open it up. And about the PDFs themselves ... Well, they seem to be scans of very old scientific articles -- with all that implies: old, hard to read fonts, horrible layout, non-searchable scans, etc... This archive would be particularly interesting to a scientific historian with good script-writing skills.



If anyone feels the inspiration, and has the necessary skills, there are hundreds of people out there downloading this who would be grateful. If you've got the scripting skills, you probably don't need my advice about how to approach it.About what Aaron did:

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Wikipedia has an okay article, which has been updated significantly since Aaron's death.



For a description of what Aaron did, it's pretty cool to read, check this out: hxxp://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html



There was a lot more to the man than this wild exploit.



A Disclaimer:

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*** Let me provide some clarification ***



It turns out the original torrent is still alive and active both here and at TPB.



New downloaders, please use the link below and go to the original. You will have more seeders and a faster download.



I will keep seeding this until all the leechers have been satisfied.



This torrent comes from a user named gmaxwell over at TPB.



You can find the same thing here (minus the .DS_STORE file that I overlooked).







Since the torrent is still very much alive, please go there. That file has the same name and upload date as the one at TPB. You'll get more seeders and faster speeds. Besides, I didn't mean to steal someone else's work.



I will continue to seed until there are no more leechers -- since some people have already gotten into this.



A kind user over at TPB alerted me to the original thread. If you do a search over there, you will get a great description.



A couple of days ago when I read of Aaron's death, I thought, "Oh yeah, right, he was the guy who did that cool JSTOR scrape at MIT". I searched KAT and TPB for "JSTOR" and got no hits. Well, at TPB, the torrent is listed as "Papers from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" -- without the word JSTOR. So that's why I didn't find there.



I thought it was topical, so I put it up. Sorry.