1. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
2.  
3. Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for
4. themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries
5. in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of
6. private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the
7. sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
8.  
9. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
10. valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
11. their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
12. even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
13. Everything up until now will have been lost.
14.  
15. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their
16. colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them?
17. Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to
18. children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
19.  
20. "I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they
21. make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal —
22. there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
23. already being done: we can fight back.
24.  
25. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been
26. given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world
27. is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for
28. yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords
29. with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
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31.  
32.  
33. Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been
34. sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by
35. the publishers and sharing them with your friends.
36.  
37. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or
38. piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a
39. ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only
40. those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
41.  
42. Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate
43. require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they
44. have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who
45. can make copies.
46.  
47. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the
48. grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public
49. culture.
50.  
51. We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with
52. the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need
53. to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific
54. journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open
55. Access.
56.  
57. With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
58. privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
59.  
60. Aaron Swartz
61.  
62. July 2008, Eremo, Italy