access to knowledge in Bodo 2015
act
In the digital era where, thanks to the ubiquity of electronic copies, the book is no longer a scarce
resource, libraries find themselves in an extremely competitive environment. Several different actors are
now in a position to provide low cost access to knowledge. One of these competitors are shadow libraries
- piratical text collections which have now amassed electronic copies of millions of copyrighted works
and provide access to them usually free of charge to anyone around the globe. While such shadow
libr
3). However technology is not
the primary cause of the emergence of cultural black markets like Aleph. The proliferation of computers
and the internet has just revealed a more fundamental issue which all has to do with the uneven
distribution of the access to knowledge around the globe.
Sometimes book pirates do more than just forecast and react to changes that are independent of them.
Under certain conditions, they themselves can be powerful agents of change (Bodó, 2011b). Their agency
rests on their ability to c
chives as a moral act, and by doing so, he created
an ideological framework which was more radical and promised to be more effective than either the
creative commons (Lessig, 2004) or the open access (Suber, 2013) movements that tried to address the
access to knowledge issues in a more copyright friendly manner. During interviews, the administrators of
Aleph used the very same arguments to justify the raison d'être of their piratical library. While it seems
that Aleph is the practical realization of Swartz’s ide
he digital era.
One of the main reasons why libraries are trying to redefine themselves as providers of ancillary services
is because the lack of digital lending rights prevents them from competing on their own traditional home
turf - in giving free access to knowledge. The traditional legal limitations and exceptions to copyright that
enabled libraries to fulfill their role in the analogue world do not apply in the digital realm. In the
European Union, the Infosoc Directive (“Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonis
access to knowledge in Constant 2015
formation. I mean we live in the West and we have
access to information more or less with physical libraries and institutions
where we can go. Specially in Asia, South America, Africa this is very
important. There is a big gap between those who have access to knowledge
and those don’t have access to knowledge.
That’s a big field to explore to be able to open up information to people who
have very poor access to information. Maybe they are not even able to write
or read. That’s already is a big handicap. So I think it is a big mission in
that sense.
C
access to knowledge in Constant 2016
k & Marcell Mars (Public Library project)
A proposal for a curriculum in amateur librarianship, developed through the
activities and exigencies of the Public Library project. Drawing from a historic
genealogy of public library as the institution of access to knowledge, the
proletarian tradition of really useful knowledge and the amateur agency driven
by technological development, the curriculum covers a range of segments from
immediately applicable workflows for scanning, sharing and using e-books,
over politics a
PEDAGOGY
This is the context of the emergence of the public library. A historical compromise between a
push for radical pedagogy and a response to dull its edge. And yet with the age of
digitization, where one would think that the opportunities for access to knowledge have
expanded immensely, public libraries find themselves increasingly limited in their ability to
acquire and lend both digital and paper editions. It is a sign of our radically unequal times
that the political emancipation finds itself on a defensi
n in a larger network
of associations and regulatory structures. Otlet's view of archives and organisation extended
to all domains and La Fontaine asserted that general peace could be achieved through social
development by the means of education and access to knowledge. Their common view was
nurtured by an acute perception of their epoch, they observed and often contributed to most
of the major experiments that were triggered by the ongoing reflection about the new
organisation modalities of society.
The ever ambit
access to knowledge in Dekker & Barok 2017
re have been professional
librarians, archivists, and publishers among the speakers, even though the voices represented were quite diverse.
To name just the more frequent participants... Marcell
and Tom Medak (Memory of the World) advocate universal
access to knowledge informed by the positions of the Yugoslav
219
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
Marxist school Praxis; Sean’s work is critical of the militarization and commercialization of the university (in the
context of which Aaaaarg will always come
access to knowledge in Dockray 2013
ed in a new constructed data center - - and that pitting “food on the table”
against “access to knowledge” is both a distraction from and a legitimation of the forms of power
emerging in the cloud. It's a distraction because it's by policing access to knowledge that the
middle-man platform can extract value from publication, both on the writing and reading sides of
the book; and it's a legitimation because the platform poses itself as the only entity that can resolve
the contradiction between the two sides.
access to knowledge in Dockray, Forster & Public Office 2018
ting Accessibility
When we say “accessibility”, some hear “information wants to be free” — but
our idea of accessibility is not about indiscriminate open access to
everything. While we do support, in many instances, the desire to increase
access to knowledge where it has been restricted by monopoly property
ownership, or the urge to increase transparency in delegated decision-making
and representative government, we also recognise that Indigenous knowledge
traditions often depend on ownership, control, c
access to knowledge in Elbakyan 2016
idea arises: if there isn't private property, then there's no basis for
unequal distribution of wealth. In our case as well: if there's no private
intellectual property and all scholarly publications are nationalized, then
all people will have equal access to knowledge.
However, a question arises: if there is no private property, then what can
stimulate a person to work? One of the ideas is that under communism, rather
than greed or aspiration for wealth being a stimulus for work, a person would
aspire to self
access to knowledge in Giorgetta, Nicoletti & Adema 2015
Inventory-of-Speculative-Strategies-Coventry-
University-June-11th-2014-21.png)
**DG, VN: In your opinion, can scholarly publishing, in particular self-
archiving practices, constitute a bridge covering the gap between authors and
users in terms of access to knowledge? Could we hope that these practices will
find a broader use, moving from very specific fields (academic papers) to book
publishing in general?**
JA: On the one hand, yes. Self-archiving, or the ‘green road’ to open access,
offers a way for acade
access to knowledge in Graziano 2018
been responding to the current crisis by mobilizing tactics and ethics as first developed within the hacker movement.
As described by Steven Levy in Hackers, the general principles of a hacker ethic include sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to knowledge and tools, and an effort of contributing to society’s democratic wellbeing. To which we could add, following Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, that “bureaucracy should not be allowed to get in the way of doing anything usef
access to knowledge in Mars & Medak 2019
Compromised institutional agency and acts of custodianship
Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak
abstract
In this essay we reflect on the historic crisis of the university and the public library as two
modern institutions tasked with providing universal access to knowledge and education.
This crisis, precipitated by pushes to marketization, technological innovation and
financialization in universities and libraries, has prompted the emergence of shadow
libraries as collective disobedient practices of maintenance and cu
as laid out in
the first Custodians.online letter, we claim that the historical trajectory of the
university and the library demands that they now embrace a position of
disobedience. They need to go back to their universalizing mission of providing
access to knowledge and education unconditionally to all members of society.
That universalism is a powerful political gesture. An infinite demand (Critchley,
2007) whereby they seek to abolish exclusions and affirm the legacy of the radical
equality they have built as
ion science. The capacity to aggregate, organize and classify huge bodies
of information, to view it as an interlinked network of references indexed in a
card catalog, sat well with the developments in the computer world. In return, the
expansion of access to knowledge that the new computer networks promised fell
in line with the promise of public libraries.
2017 – Crisis in the present, financialization, compromised subjectivity
We arrive in the present. The effects of neo-liberal restructuring, the global
divi
t have access to in print to start with.
As for libraries, in the shift to the digital they were denied the right to provide
access that has now radically expanded (Sullivan, 2012), so they are losing their
central position in the dissemination and access to knowledge. The decades of
retrenchment in social security, unemployment support, social housing, arts and
education have made libraries, with their resources open to broad communities,
into a stand-in for failing welfare institutions (Mattern, 2014). But with
es as social infrastructures, provide a chance for retardation and
slowdown, and a capacity for collective disobedience. Against the radicalizing
exclusions of property and labor market, they can lower insecurities and
disobediently demand universal access to knowledge and education, a mass
intellectuality and autonomous critical pedagogy that increasingly seems a thing
of the past. Against the imposition to translate quality into metrics and capture
short-term values through assessment, they can resist the game of
ce, deceleration and demands for
inclusiveness. Ubu already hints toward such recuperation on three coordinates:
1) practiced opposition to the regime of intellectual property, 2) transformative
use of old technologies, and 3) a promise of universal access to knowledge and
education, helping to foster mass intellectuality and critical pedagogy.
The first Custodians.online letter was drafted to voice the need for a collective
disobedience. Standing up openly in public for the illegal acts of piracy, which
are, howev
access to knowledge in Mars & Medak 2019
duces any understanding of
our contemporary technosocial condition to an analogy with the
scarcity-based language of property over land, has meant that they
have failed to adjudicate a matter of conflict between the equalizing effects of universal access to knowledge and the guarantees of
rightful remuneration for intellectual labor into a meaningful social
resolution. Rather they have primarily reasserted the agonistic
aspect by supporting exclusively the commercial interests of large
copyright industries that s
ion from the landed logic of
property being imposed onto the world of the intellect, a reason
to which few would object, it would be for access for educational
purposes. Universities in particular give an institutional form to
the premise that equal access to knowledge is a prerequisite for
building a society where all people are equal.
In this noble endeavor to make universal access to knowledge
central to social development, some universities stand out more
than the others. Consider, for example, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT). The Free Culture and Open Access movements
have never hidden their origins, inspiration, and mode
isk being executed like
other ‘pirates’ . . . If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or
force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important
idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge. . . .
Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their
income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal. Also the idea
that knowledge can be a private property of some commercial
company sounds absolutely weird to me” (Ernesto 2015).
If the issue of infringement is to become pol
access to knowledge in Mars, Medak & Sekulic 2016
hemselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowledge
was a pre-condition for full participation
in society. For its part, the British labor
movement of the mid-19th century had to
resort to opening workers' reading-rooms,
projects of proletarian self-education and
the class struggle in order to achieve the
establishment of the institution of public
libraries financed by taxes, and the right
thereby for access to knowledge and culture for all members of society.
SHAD OW P U B L I C L I B R A R I ES
Public library as a space of exemption from
commodification of knowledge and culture
is an institution that complexifies the unconditional and formulaic application of
inte
society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and d
access to knowledge in Mars & Medak 2017
e had the artists give regular workshops in
DJ-ing, sound editing, VJ-ing, video editing and collaborative writing at schools
and our summer camp Otokultivator. It inspired us to start working on alternatives
to the copyright regime and on issues of access to knowledge and culture.
PJ & AK: The civil society is the collective conscious, which provides leverage
against national and corporate agendas and serves as a powerful social corrective.
Thus, at the outbreak of the US invasion to Iraq, Net.culture club MaMa re
nowledge is still alive mostly because of piracy.
PJ & AK: This brings us to the struggle against (knowledge as) private
property. What are the main problems in this struggle? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: Many projects addressing the crisis of access to knowledge are
originated in Eastern Europe. Examples include Library Genesis, Science Hub,
Monoskop and Memory of the World. Balázs Bodó’s research (2016) on the ethos
of Library Genesis and Science Hub resonates with our beliefs, shared through all
abovem
ned projects, that the concept of private property should not be taken
for granted. Private property can and should be permanently questioned,
challenged and negotiated. This is especially the case in the face of artificial
scarcity (such as lack of access to knowledge caused by intellectual property in
context of digital networks) or selfish speculations over scarce basic human
256
KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES
resources (such as problems related to housing, water or waterfront development)
(Mars,
icipation in the society, and b)
commodification of knowledge in the form of book trade needs to be limited by
public de-commodified non-monetary forms of access through public institutions.
In spite of enormous expansion of potentials for providing access to knowledge
to all regardless of their social status or geographic location brought about by the
digital technologies, public libraries have been radically limited in pursuing their
mission. This results in side-lining of public libraries in enormous expansion o
t they do not build a particularly strong ground for defending knowledge
commons. Once they arrive under attack, therefore, shadow libraries are typically
shut down. In our call for collective disobedience, therefore, we want to make a
larger claim. Access to knowledge as a universal condition could not exist if we –
academics and non-academics across the unevenly developed world – did not
create own ways of commoning knowledge that we partake in producing and
learning. By introducing the figure of the custodia
e and shut it down in a matter of months (Save
Ashgate Publishing petition, 2015).
The system of academic publishing is patently broken. It syphons off public
funding of science and education into huge private profits, while denying living
wages and access to knowledge to its producers. This business model is legal, but
deeply illegitimate. Many scientists and even governments agree with this
conclusion – yet, situation cannot be easily changed because of entrenched power
passed down from the old models of publis
cial institutions – public libraries, UNESCO, museums. Operating in an
economic system premised on unequal distribution of means, they cannot but fail
to deliver on their universalist promise. Thus, while public libraries have a mission
to provide access to knowledge to all members of the society, they are severely
limited in what they can do to accomplish that mission in the digital realm. By
claiming the mission of universal access to knowledge for shadow libraries,
collectively built shared infrastructures redress the current state of affairs outside of
the territory of institutions. Insofar, these acts of commoning can indeed be
regarded as positioned beyond the state (Holloway, 2002, 201
lic Library project enjoys strong and unequivocal complicity
of art institutions, schools and libraries for its causes and activities. While
collectively building practices that abolish the present state of affairs and reclaim
the dream of universal access to knowledge, we rearticulate the vision of a
radically equal society equipped with institutions that can do justice to that
“infinite demand” (Critchley, 2013). We are collectively pursuing this collective
dream – in words of our friend and our continuing
access to knowledge in Medak, Mars & WHW 2015
ce of available knowledge that can
be collected—looked impossible for a long time,
until the egalitarian impetus of social revolutions,
the Enlightment idea of universality of knowledge,
and the expcetional suspenssion of the comercial
barriers to access to knowledge made it possible.
The internet has, as in many other situations, completely changed our expectations and imagination
about what is possible. The dream of a catalogue
of the world — a universal approach to all available
knowledge for every member of
t which the line of
global distribution of personal computers meets
that of the critical mass of people with access to
the internet. Today nobody lacks the imagination
necessary to see public libraries as part of a global infrastructure of universal access to knowledge
for literally every member of society. However, the
08 “Dewey Decimal Classification: 001.”, Dewey.info, 27 October 2014, http://dewey.info/class/001/2009-08/about.en.
78
M. Mars • M. Zarroug • T. Medak
emergence and development of the in
d share knowledge and skills.14 Fascinating. Unfortunately, for purely tactical reasons, this
reminder to the public does not always contain an
explanation of how these varied effects arise out of
the foundational idea of a public library: universal
access to knowledge for each member of the society produces knowledge, produces knowledge about
knowledge, produces knowledge about knowledge
transfer: the public library produces sociability.
The public library does not need the sort of creative crisis management that
blic
library from the historical stage. Sociability—produced by public libraries, with all the richness of its
various appearances—will be best preserved if we
manage to fight for the values upon which we have
built the public library: universal access to knowledge for each member of our society.
Freedom, equality, and brotherhood need brave librarians practicing civil disobedience.
Library Genesis, aaaaarg.org, Monoskop, UbuWeb
are all examples of fragile knowledge infrastructures
built and maintained by brave
red the lines between histories
and their construction, dominant classifications and
their immanent instabilities.
Where does the library fit into this trajectory? Operating around an uncertain and politically embattled universal principle of public access to knowledge
and organization of information, libraries continued being sites of epistemic and social antagonisms,
adaptations and resilience in response to the challenges created by the waves of radical expansion of
textuality and conflicting social interests be
access to knowledge in Sekulic 2018
ion shaping him – works by Marxists, revolutionaries, anarchists,
abolitionists, and civil rights activists, some of whom were also prisoners
during their lifetime. Many books from Herman's library would not be
accessible to those serving time, as access to knowledge for the inmate
population in the US is increasingly being regulated. A peak into the list of
banned books, which at one point included Michelle Alexander's The New Jim
Crow (The New Press, 2010), reveals the incentive of the ban was to prevent
access to knowledge that would allow inmates to understand their position in
society and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. It is becoming
increasingly difficult for inmates to have chance encounters with a book that
could change their lives; given access to knowledge they could see their
position in life from another perspective; they could have a moment of
revelation like the one Cle Sloan had. Sloan, a member of the Los Angeles gang
Bloods encountered his neighborhood Athens Park on a 1972 Los Angeles Police
De
if indeed there ever even was one – between the labor that produces culture
and knowledge and its commodification as codified in existing copyright
regulations.”(6) Here, disobedience and piracy have an equalizing effect on
the asymmetries of access to knowledge.
In 2008, programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz published Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto triggered by the enclosure of scientific knowledge production
of the past, often already part of public domain, via digitization. “The
world's entire scienti
of the scanner I had used. While I do not know if
this act of digitization made a dent or was co-opted, seeing the image was a
small proof that digitization can bring books back into circulation and access
to them might make a difference – or that access to knowledge can be a weapon.
[Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/sekulic/) writes
about the production of space. She is an amateur-librarian at Public
Library/Memory of the World, where she maintains feminist, and space/race
collect
access to knowledge in Sollfrank 2018
or download without charge and without any other
restrictions. And because there is a whole network of shadow libraries whose
mission is “to remove all barriers in the way of science,”17 experts speak of
an ecosystem fostering free and universal access to knowledge.
The notion of the shadow library enjoyed popularity in the early 2000s when
the wide availability of digital networked media contributed to the emergence
of large-scale repositories of scientific materials, the most famous one
having been Gigapedia
_
The above discussion illustrates that the phenomenon of shadow libraries
cannot be reduced to its copyright infringing aspects. It needs to be
contextualized within a larger sociopolitical debate that situates the demand
for free and unrestricted access to knowledge within the struggle against the
all-co-opting logic of capital, which currently aims to economize all aspects
of life.
In his analysis of the Russian shadow libraries Balazs has drawn a parallel to
the commons as an alternative mode of ownership and
access to knowledge in Sollfrank & Mars 2013
obably we’d
just try to add a little bit of new software, and new ways that we can read
the books. [13:53] But at the moment [it’s] super important actually to keep
this infrastructure running, because this super important infrastructure for
the access to knowledge is now under huge threat.
[14:09]
Copyright
[14:13]
I just think that it’s completely inappropriate – that copyright law is
completely inappropriate for the Public Library. I don’t know about other
cases, but in terms of Public L
access to knowledge in Tenen 2016
current fellows initiated a debate on the status of the author
in the 21st century as well as closely related questions on the copyright
system. The event »[Custodians.online – The Struggle over the Future of
›Pirate‹ Libraries and Universal Access to Knowledge](http://www.akademie-
solitude.de/en/events/custodiansonline-the-struggle-over-the-future-of-pirate-
libraries-and-universal-access-to-knowledge~no3779/)« was part of the debate
by which the Akademie offers its fellows to articulate diverse and alre
sis,
which increasingly find themselves in legal peril. I do not yet know what the
organizers have in mind, but my own thoughts in preparation for the day’s
activities revolve around the following few premises:
1\. The case for universal and free access to knowledge is stronger when it is
made on ethical, technological, and **tactical** grounds, not just legal.
The cost of sharing and reproduction in the digital world are too low to
sustain practices and institutions built on the assumptions of print. The
attem
access to knowledge in Tenen & Foxman 2014
y on the continuum between free
culture and intellectual property rights. On the one side, an argument
is made for unrestricted access to information as a prerequisite to
properly deliberative democracy.^[5](#fn-2025-5){#fnref-2025-5}^ On this
view, access to knowledge is a form of political power, which must be
equitably distributed, redressing regional and social imbalances of
access.^[6](#fn-2025-6){#fnref-2025-6}^ The other side offers pragmatic
reasoning related to the long-term sustainability of the cultural
access to knowledge in Thylstrup 2019
his is not a claim about knowledge: it is a claim about power.
‘Knowledge plays a hitherto unrecognized role in power,’ Gaukroger writes.
‘The model is not Plato but Machiavelli.’1 Knowledge, in other words, is an
instrument of the powerful. Access to knowledge gives access to that
instrument of power, but merely having knowledge or using it does not
automatically confer power. The powerful always have the ways and means to use
knowledge toward their own ends. … How can we connect the most people with the
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
43. Borgman, Christine L. 2015. _Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
44. Bottando, Evelyn. 2012. _Hedging the Commons: Google Books, Libraries, and Open Access to Knowledge_. Iowa City: University of Iowa.
45. Bowker, Geoffrey C., Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, and David Ribes. 2010. “Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment.” In _The International Handbook of Interne
access to knowledge in WHW 2016
and thus rule, govern, and
control the spaces in which we live.7
By building a repository of digitized books, and enabling others to do this
as well, Public Library promotes the idea of the library as a truly public institution that offers universal access to knowledge, which “together with
free public education, a free public healthcare, the scientific method, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software,
among others – we, the people, are most proud of ”, as the authors of the
project have said.8 Public Library develops devices for the free sharing of
books, but it also functions as a platform for advocating social solidarity
in free access to knowledge. By ignoring and avoiding the restrictive legal
regime for intellectual property, which was brought about by decades of
neoliberalism, as well as the privatization or closure of public institutions,
spatial controls, policing, and surveillance – al
lic Library
endeavour. But the scanner itself does not need to be visible. In 2014, at
the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, we curated the
exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, which dealt with conflicts triggered by
struggles over access to knowledge and the effects that knowledge, as the
basis of capital reproduction, has on the totality of workers’ lives. In the
exhibition, the production funds allocated to Public Library were used to
build the book scanner at Calafou, an anarchist cooperativ
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.