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Comment by Nemo_bis | Hacker News Reader

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So, yes, torrents help to preserve what has already been archived in the past, but we still need a lot more works to be deposited in open archives like Zenodo or arxiv in the first place.

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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.

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

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.

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