Extracts of The Library of Alexandra

On June 6th 2017, in a series of tweets, Carl Malamud @carlmalamud  unearthed a very interesting entity. Carl describes himself on Twitter as:-

Archivist. Usually Civil Servant. Founder of http://Public.Resource.Org . Open Source America’s Operating System. It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

 

Carl Malamud is the President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org. The author of 8 books, Malamud was previously founder of the Internet Multicasting Service, a nonprofit that started the first radio station on the Internet and was responsible for making the SEC EDGAR database available. He is the recipient of the Berkman Award from Harvard, the Pioneer Award from the EFF, and the Bill Farr Award from the First Amendment Coalition.

SOURCE

1/10 Public Resource has been conducting an intensive audit of the scholarly literature. We have focused on works of the U.S. government.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

2/ Our audit has determined that 1,264,429 journal articles authored by federal employees or officers are potentially void of copyright.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

3/ To further examine the subject, I have made a copy of a database known as scihub, which has 63+ million journal articles.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

4/ The purpose of this copy is to create a transformational use, an extraction of all components of scihub that are in the public domain.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

5/ Of the 1,264,429 government journal articles I have metadata for, I am now able to access 1,141,505 files (90.2%) for potential release.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

6/ In addition, 2,031,359 of the articles in my possession are dated 1923 or earlier. These 2 categories represent 4.92% of scihub.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

7/ Additional categories to examine include lapsed copyright registrations, open access that is not, and author-retained copyrights.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

8/ Public Resource will make extracts of the Library of Alexandra available shortly, will present the issues to publishers and governments.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

9/ Alexandra Elbakyan created scihub and has made a profound and brave contribution to access to knowledge. We should all stand with her.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

And he concludes his thread with:-

10/ Universal access to all knowledge is the great unachieved promise of our generation. With the Internet, this dream can become real.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

In a subsequent tweet, he confirms that he will be taking this further:-

Here’s submission to American Bar Association on that. https://t.co/8zl4LQ7bTH Hoping for consideration by House of Delegates in August.

— Carl Malamud (@carlmalamud) June 6, 2017

I have since updated the Reception section of the Wikipedia page about Sci-Hub to reflect this.