Good idea. I just created a torrent file. I̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶c̶o̶m̶p̶r̶e̶s̶s̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶ ̶p̶i̶c̶k̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶P̶D̶F̶'̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶l̶o̶a̶d̶,̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶l̶o̶a̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶l̶i̶b̶r̶a̶r̶y̶. (It's now a compressed zip file; see update below.) Here's the magnet URI:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:1D845DB543FFF3DE83B66FAA595F1A3D9F42ED42&dn=Library.zip&tr=udp%3a//tracker.openbittorrent.com%3a80/announce
Please note that many (~40%) of the books and articles included here were given to me by several different friends over the past few years. So although the stuff you own does say a lot about you, I'd like to ask those who decide to download this material to kindly abstain from making any strong inferences (flattering or unflattering) about me from the list of items in my library. ;-)
I hope to keep seeding indefinitely, but I can't guarantee this for the long term. So please seed, too, if you can.
One final thing: if you have a large library of files yourself, please consider sharing it with us!
UPDATE: the torrent became corrupted when I added new files to the directory (which I do regularly, since my library is constantly expanding). So I created a new torrent with a zipped file of the library at its current state. You won't be able to pick which pdfs to download, but at least the torrent will not become corrupted again. The magnet URI changed, so make sure you have the updated version, posted above.
2nd UPDATE: there are now two separate torrents; see here for details.
No seeds, none for a while in fact.
Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.
If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.
Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.
Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.
If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, Google Reader will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).
If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.