[quectophoton]

As much as I like BitTorrent, people (usually) don't want to provide open access to information; what they (usually) want is to be an "open" gateway to that information, as long as they are the centralized point of distribution whose name appears in the URL bar, and as long as they control when they can remove access to that information.

Creating a torrent is not showy enough, because the credit is "just" another file and/or a comment in the torrent metadata.

Granted, they usually do that because they want to "kindly" advertise a way to donate to them (EDIT: or to track you, or other similar goals), and there's nothing wrong with trying to get donations, but there's clearly a conflict of interest at play here.

[kragen]

It doesn't matter what people usually want. It's sufficient for someone to want to torrent the open-access articles, even if everyone else is playing the exploitative games you're describing. The Berlin Declaration that defined "open access" https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration requires specifically

> The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

This guarantees that such torrents are legal unless the original authors are infringing copyright.

So there is no danger of AI bots destroying open access.

[Nemo_bis]

Someone still needs to assemble those documents to create the torrent collections in the first place. That's harder now that captchas and other access walls are getting more and more hostile to human consumption.

So, yes, torrents help to preserve what has already been archived in the past, but we still need a lot more works to be deposited in open archives like Zenodo or arxiv in the first place.

[kragen]

Yes, that is a problem. Publishers should seed the torrents and publish their hashes, thus vouching for the authenticity of the documents therein. But even if they don't, it only takes one trustworthy researcher passing the Captchas to add an open-access document to a legal archive which provides periodic torrents.

To be clear, neither Zenodo nor arXiv rejects non-open-access papers, so you cannot simply provide a torrent of arXiv papers, legally.

[Nemo_bis]

Diamond open access and fully OA publishers might do that (maybe as an add-on service on top of LOCKSS or Portico), but the Big Five definitely do not want to do that, because they sell bulk access services at lofty prices.

There's no use expecting anything from the publishers. Universities and independent archives need to do the job.

https://blog.archive.org/2020/09/15/how-the-internet-archive...

As for arxiv, they already make the full dump available:

https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html

Even for works not published on arxiv with a Creative Commons license, the basic arxiv license gives them the right to do so:

https://info.arxiv.org/help/license/index.html

You can torrent the arxiv dump with Internet Archive torrents:

https://archive.org/details/arxiv-bulk

[kragen]

That's wonderful! I didn't know that! But, as I read it, the basic arXiv license only permits the arXiv itself to redistribute, not anyone. So it's not clear that participation in the torrent is legal, particularly after the arXiv is shut down.