Academic Torrents: A Community-Maintained Distributed Repository

Abstract

Fostering the free and open sharing of scientific knowledge between the scientific community and general public is the goal of Academic Torrents. At its core it is a distributed network for efficient content dissemination, connecting scientists, academic journals, readers, research groups, and many others. Leveraging the power of its peer-to-peer architecture, Academic Torrents makes science more accessible through two initiatives. The open data initiative allows researchers to share their datasets at high speeds with low bandwidth costs through the peer-to-peer network. The cooperative nature of scientific research demands access to data, but researchers face significant hurdles making their data available. The technical benefits of the Academic Torrents network allows researchers to scalably and globally distribute content, leading to its adoption by labs all around the world to disseminate and share scientific data. Academic Torrent's open access initiative uses the same technology to share open access papers between institutions and individuals. We design a connector to our network that acts as a onsite digital stack to complement the already existing physical stack curated in the same manner. Utilizing the collective resources of the academic community we eliminate the biases in the closed subscription model and the pay to publish model.