Please don’t try this at home part II

I’d like to follow up on the general argument I am seeing in some comments that “Swartz did this for research purposes, and therefore its ok.”   I won’t comment on the criminal charges or penalities.  Out of my range to comment on.  I think an alternative history of JSTOR to complement Schonfeld’s very throughly footnoted volume would be a nice penance.

First, full disclosure – I have gotten my hand slapped for research spidering a site that caused the host sites heavy server traffic.  I felt bad about it.  I didn’t know what I was doing, or that it would have such a noticeable affect. It didn’t involve downloading. Perhaps my own experiences being called to the carpet by very annoyed server admins make me think more about the people inconvenienced by this.  Or maybe i just hang out with info labor people too much.

Ok, he did it for research purposes – but did he think about what kind of effect it was having on people?

From an institutional review board/human subject protection perspective, doing research that causes an entire campus decreased access to an important database, or doing research that causes malfunctions on the publisher’s server end is not ok.

I’m willing to posit that most people would agree as a general principle that it is not ok to do research that throws off all the administrative functioning at a large organization– for quite a length of time!  This wastes people’s time, money, energy.

The research may be worthy, but one ought figure out a way to do it that does not cause users at MIT to lose access, does not cause administrative turmoil at MIT and JSTOR.

That being said, I believe publishers ought to make their text corpi available for research. Further, they ought to grant 3rd party providers like JSTOR permissions to allow research spidering of their works (remember JsTOR is under various obligations to the publishers whose stuff they host — they may not have the rights to grant permission— open question).

My opinion might change. I have many questions: Was the research _that_ crucial to merit the harm that it caused to the users of JSTOR at MIT, or to staff at MIT and JSTOR if no access program existed?  Did he try to negotiate access? How hard?  Could he have waited or found an alternative (less disruptive) way to get the same data? I’ll be curious to see the details that emerge.

Special issue: International Journal of Internet Research Ethics Vol 9 (2008)

Useful article: Academic Data Collection in Electronic Environments: Defining Acceptable Use of Internet Resources, 30 MIS Q. 599 (2006) (with Gove N. Allen & Gordon B. Davis).

p.s. all computer science types who don’t know what human subjects/IRB stuff is, please go take your institution’s human subjects training.

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