Researchers from Massachusetts University have created a torrent website that allows academics to share documents and data.
The page AcademicTorrents offers to researchers a trusted and decentralized platform to share their work with their peers, and the rest of the world. The website so far hosts over 1,5 petabytes of data, including a NASA map of Mars.
The site was started by Joseph Cohen and Henry Lo, two PhD students working at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The website aims to provide academics with a cheap and decentralized platform to share their work and their data with the rest of the world.
“Data sharing is difficult. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers έχει πάρα πολύ δουλειά. Έχουμε σχεδιάσει ένα κατανεμημένο σύστημα για την ανταλλαγή τεράστιων αρχείων – για τους ερευνητές, από τους ερευνητές. Το αποτέλεσμα είναι μια κλιμακούμενη, ασφαλή, και ανεκτική αποcase data, with incredibly fast download speeds,” Cohen and Lo report.
Η AcademicTorrents runs its own tracker and supports web-seeds, so the files are available at any time.
One of the goals of the program is to re-search researchers instead of being locked behind paywalls. Today, most of the top releases bring money to publishers, but with AcademicTorrents, each edition will be distributed free of charge.
On the site you can find a map of it NASA (42 gigabytes) showing the planet Mars, as well as a recent copy of it Wikipedia.
