is a non-profit corporation whose scope is to create, collect, organize and distribute digital documents of biological literature
BioSophia 2007 : a new strategy explained
A reconsideration of our activity has led us to stop this way to distribute scientific literature. The website will be kept open until we can afford it, but no new papers will be added since now.
We in fact decided to distribute "our" papers (mostly scan of ancient and/or rare publications) via the P2P file-exchange network - i. e., via the very same way that many use for exchanging videos, music etc. The most known among the programs used for these exchanges is probably Emule, see http://www.emule-project.net for details.
This solution may appear strange, but we adopted it for 4 reasons:
(1) - To solve the problem of distributing big files
An high quality scan of an ancient book may result in a file of hundreds of Megabytes. It's almost impossible, exception made for big organizations with equally big resources, to distribute such files via web "http" or "ftp" protocols. In fact the resulting server spaces with associate bandwith still cost a lot of money.
The result is that not only BioSophia was obliged to limit itself to distribute small files, but also much bigger organizations, that potentially could distribute very rare and important works of the past, are obliged to "protect" their on-line books - for example, many leave free for download only one page at a time, so that the whole of the download traffic is bound in reasonable terms and does not overwhelms the servers.
P2P programs, on the contrary, have no size problems - files up to 4-5 Gigabytes are commonly exchanged - and this opened to us the possibility to distribute many important papers that were precedently left aside.
(2) - To reduce the "take-away" download
The great majority of BioSophia users - several thousands, thru the years - downloaded file after file with no feedback at all. Neither, with a few exceptions, they contributed something new to add. We call it the "take-away" strategy: take away all that you can, contribute the less you can.
P2P programs like Emule use specially designed algorhytms that hash univocally every file, and then "break" it in parts ("chunks") of approximately 9,5 Mb in size. Every chunk, when complete, is immediately downloadable from other users. So, it's the program itself that obliges a downloader to share with others what's downloading.
Still, it makes downloads easier to people that uploads a lot; so that a user is encouraged to share for its own scopes.
We believe useful this logic to encourage people to learn that there are not only days for taking, but also days for giving.
(3) - To minimize duplications
We are convinced that many around the world often scan for theirselves and make a digital version of a paper or of a book that someone else did earlier. Presently, there's not a way to check such duplications. A widespread use of the P2P network and its associate search methods can be very useful in this regard.
(4) - To make P2P better
A gigantic net of dozens of servers and millions of PCs communicate every day to exchange files, the major part of which having little significance for human progress and intelligence - to say it smooth.
We firmly believe that these energies may be, at least in part, re-addressed to exchange real, honest data.
To us, it's something of unbelievable that such an immense net, born thru the efforts of thousands of programmers, should be confined to exchange copyrighted materials and porno videos.
On the other hand, if no one put in a basket other than trash, the basket unavoidably fills with trash and nothing else.
And, then, it's easy to say: "P2P is all trash".
But if we use this net to exchange and distribute also good files, the whole of P2P world will be bettered.
We know that the P2P distribution has problems.
The major one is probably that the search methods are far from being perfect, and limit strongly the number of results.
The second, is that unavoidably many users make and share digital copies of copyrighted works, exactly as others do for movies or songs.
On the other hand, everyone has the responsability of his own actions. No one obliges no one else to download a copyrighted file, and it's up to our responsability of users to limit ourselves to do what the Law permits.
For every one interested to contribute to this project, presently started mainly for malacological documents, we warmly suggest to install (if not installed, of course) a copy of Emule, and try a search for a text document whose name is
Please, be well understood that BioSophia has never and will never create and distribute digital copies of copyrighted documents, neither encourages in any way this practice.
The great part of documents presently circulating in the P2P network and associated with the "MALACOSHARE" tag - over 200 Gigabytes so far - have been posted by dozens of anonymous different contributors, with which BioSophia has no relationships at all. All documents posted by BioSophia itself since the start of the project are, as usual, scans of old (pre-1925) books and papers.
The methods changed, but not the scopes and the containts.