A Torrents Site for Academics - Good idea - Wish We Had Thought of That (Oh wait ...)

Just saw a Tweet from Jeff Ross-Ibarra at UC Davis

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