Political pressure from ignorant Republican congressmen not only resulted in Jiang being fired over this non-incident, but something even more serious for science in general: the entire NASA technical-report archive [1], with documents dating back decades, has been forced offline indefinitely [2]. Frank Wolf and his ilk are worried [3] that the Red Chinese might be reading some 1970s document in a way that compromises American national security. Never mind that the Chinese likely have copied a mirror of any documents they find interesting already. So now it's only American researchers who can't access it: there are no complete mirrors of which I'm aware, because U.S. libraries and archives naively assumed that NASA was a reliable long-term host for the documents, meaning there were no serious mirroring efforts. Maybe we can ask China to take pity on us and make a mirror available, since ntrs.nasa.gov being down breaks thousands of references in papers and elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this is also the case for the majority of commercially-published science. And no, JSTOR is not a good response because JSTOR doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of science. Science is one of the most important efforts in human history, and we don't have backups, or even mirrors. Great.
Edit: does anyone know some orgs with deep pockets that would be willing to accept and host 30-50 terabytes of papers? I can't seem to find anyone that doesn't wuss out. I know it's risky, but it's also critically important.
I believe some one already tried something similar, it unfortunately didn't end well[0]. If some one does throw up such a torrent though I'd be glad to help seed.
Had Aaron successfully seeded it a few times (if indeed that was even his intention in the first place), not really much would have changed for him. However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.
> However I am certain that we would have the entirety of what he seeded.
You guys are all crazy.. torrents consisting of this type of content already exist, and they have only one seeder. For example, the excellent Library Genesis collection. Why should I believe you when you tell me countless people will come to the rescue this time? Your average seeder doesn't have piles of terabytes, and evidently doesn't care to seed one or two parts out of thousands.
People hoard all sorts of data, if they are made aware of it and want it. I for one certainly would have seeded the dump Aaron made, had he seeded it himself first. And who doesn't have piles of terabytes these days?
What is your objective, give it to people that don't want it, or make it available to people that do? The later is not rocket science, the former impossible and pointless. If you are telling me that nobody is interested in your content then I am not going to argue with you... If people are interested in having your content then the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection to attempting to distribute it.
If I am so wrong, so what? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
> the only thing standing in their way is your weird objection
> to attempting to distribute it.
My point was that people are already trying to host this sort of science content over torrents and it's not working. Nobody seeds it. I gave a very specific example to confirm this observation. I would love to hear about possible alternatives.
libgen has many journals and compilations of papers, how is that not exactly what you're talking about?
Also, if the collection was only 95%, 98%, 99%, or 99.5% complete, would you mirror it? Keep in mind that you would also have to purchase/acquire about $500-$1500 of storage space.
does anyone know some orgs with deep pockets that would be willing to accept and host 30-50 terabytes of papers? I can't seem to find anyone that doesn't wuss out. I know it's risky, but it's also critically important.
It'll be extra funny when we lose the docs because budget cuts cancel the proper storage of backups and then we have to go steal them back from the Chinese.
Reminds me tangentially of this story about a company misplacing petrochemical-plant documentation and having to get copies from ex-employees who weren't supposed to actually have copies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390719
[1] http://ntrs.nasa.gov/
[2] http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/
[3] http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=40365