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Tre mesi dopo, nel luglio del 2008, durante un suo viaggio in Italia, Aaron lavorò insieme ad altri colleghi – che, successivamente, non si vollero esporre come coautori del documento – su un breve testo che intitolò Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
Il suo pensiero politico e la sua voglia di attivismo si stavano già spostando in un’altra, entusiasmante direzione: il diritto di tutti i cittadini del mondo ad accedere liberamente al sapere scientifico e ai contenuti prodotti in società.
Con questo documento, Aaron prese anche una posizione pubblica ufficiale di supporto al movimento open access, un insieme di teorie e di azioni, sociali e politiche, volte a rimuovere ostacoli tecnici e paywalls (“barriere di pedaggio”) che impediscano ai cittadini l’accesso alle pubblicazioni esito di ricerche scientifiche, spesso finanziate con fondi pubblici.
Il testo in lingua originale del Manifesto, come pubblicato su Internet Archive, è il seguente:
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable. «I agree» many say, «but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them»
But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download
