Our tribute to Aaron Swartz – #pdftribute

ORIGINAL: Jessica Richman / Wikipedia

January 13, 2013

Swartz at 2009 Boston Wikipedia Meetup

Aaron was an activist, a champion, and an incredibly smart guy who worked on things he really cared about. So much has been said about his life, his death, and his fight for research open access — and I’m glad to be part of this conversation.

Late last night, I noticed that @evavivalt was opening access to her papers online in tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I tweeted to some people I know in Silicon Valley, and to some friends of Aaron’s, and then Anonymous picked it up — and it just caught on. We’ve now had over 3.5 million impressions and over 500 tweets per hour.

This is something we can do for the memory of Aaron Swartz, and to lead the way toward more access to the scientific process for everyone.

Now is the time to participate.

If you’re in the UK, write to @ukhouseoflords using this link as they are accepting comment on these issues over the next couple of weeks. If you’re in the United States, perhaps you can help launch a similar inquiry at the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology by tweeting to @SciSpaceTechCmt.

For hackers, perhaps you can take all of the #pdftribute files and put them on a central web page. Maybe other journals will follow (or exceed!) JSTOR’s lead and give more open access. Whatever happens, let’s all be a part of it.

Please tweet your papers using #pdftribute!

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Aaron H. Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. Swartz co-authored the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS[2], and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also built Infogami, a company that merged with Reddit in its early days, through which he became an equal owner of the merged company.[i]

Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He cofounded the online group Demand Progress (best known recently for its campaign for Richard O'Dwyer) and later worked with US and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation.[3][4] JSTOR offended Swartz mainly for two reasons: 

• it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors and 
• it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities.[5][6] 

On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead in his Crown Heights, Brooklyn, apartment, where he had hanged himself.[7][8][9]

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UPDATE: #pdftribute hashtagged tweets http://t.co/7PjIZp5y by @patricksocha and @devopstom