the guerillas of the open access movement
Motivation: Read the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.
Many online journal sites, like JSTOR, even charge for articles which have entered the public domain. (Anything published before 1923 is public domain under US law.) If you have copies of such articles, please upload them to archive.org and let us know. (If you're worried about license restrictions, see "contract stripping" below.)
If you have a bit more skills or time, we suggest liberating entire journal archives from these sites and uploading them to file sharing networks. If anyone does so, let us know we'll post about it here. Also be sure to send in your requests.
There are a wide variety of databases whose content is public domain or uncopyrightable (in the US, databases of straight facts can't be copyrighted) but whose publishers try to prevent people from distributing them by forcing anyone who buys them to sign contracts.
We, however, are not bound by such contracts. Any such CDs, DVDs, or hard drives sent to:
The Content Liberation Front
c/o Aaron Swartz
950 Massachusetts Ave., #320
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
will be copied, placed online for everyone, and any remaining evidence destroyed. If you need money for purchases, postage, or hard drives, the mailing list may be able to arrange some kind of grant.
Stay tuned. And contact us if you have the URLs/IDs for out-of-copyright Google books.
While Google and Amazon will only show you a little bit of a book at a time, with some skill you can end up getting a lot of these little bits and it's not to hard to pull them out thru a proxy or from your browser cache.
We're looking for developers who want to write tools to help automate the process of collecting and uploading these book snippets. We're also looking for folks who will try to simply crawl the books directly.
Discussion: Join the mailing list.
Contact: Email us privately at me@aaronsw.com or online.