This could be very cool. “@asadinmaa: Academics Launch Torrent Site to Share Papers and Datasets. http://t.co/yKsMvh301b”
— Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (@jrossibarra) February 2, 2014
It refers to this: Academics Launch Torrent Site to Share Papers and Datasets | TorrentFreak. Nice idea. And I hope it finds some uses. Though I wish they had mentioned that Morgan Langille who was a post doc in my lab at the time launched a version of exactly such a site in 2010. See for example
- Biotorrents Site
- Our paper in PLOS One: BioTorrents: A File Sharing Service for Scientific Data
- BioTorrent aims to open data sharing floodgates in Nature News
- My blog post about it.
- Genome Web article
- John Timmer in ArsTehcnica: BitTorrenting biology, getting the big picture in search
- Morgan Langille’s blog interviewing himself about it
Now, Biotorrents has kind of wilted a bit over the years so I can see why they might not want to mention it. But still, I think they should have. In fact, perhaps they could have talked to Morgan Langille about some of his experiences with trying to run Biotorrents over the years …
If anyone out there wants to track him down – Morgan is now an Assistant Professor at Dalhausie University. See his Web site here. Follow him on Twitter here.
UPDATE 1:15 PM 2/2/14
Just discovered that a few days ago Morgan Langille and others discussed this exact issue