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Suicide Prompts Groundswell in Open Access Movement

Fred Benenson
/
Wikimedia Commons

The suicide of computer prodigy and internet activist Aaron Swartz on January 11th has prompted a groundswell of support for the open access movement - the push to make academic publications available online, free of charge and without copyright restrictions.

Swartz helped invent RSS feeds - the technology that allows website updates and internet search results to be automatically delivered to users - and co-founded the social news site Reddit. He was also a staunch advocate of open access, which he viewed as a social justice issue. His Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto began:

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.

Swartz went on to exhort those with access to academic publications to share that content however they could:

Those with access to these resources - students, librarians, scientists - you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge whie the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not - indeed, morally, you cannot - keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.

Swartz himself faced federal charges for allegedly hacking into JSTOR, a database of academic publications, and his family have blamed his suicide on the pressureof facing up to 35 years in prison for his actions, which some havelikened to Robin Hood. The Twitter hashtag #pdftributewas created to honor the activist, and has been tweeted more than 40,000 times with links to freely available academic papers, instructions on how to make academic content available, and mainstream media coverage of Aaron Swartz and the open access movement.

Open access has been gaining traction over the past decade. Matt Person, serials librarian at the MBL-WHOI Library, says open access articles now make up approximately 20% of publications. And impact factors for open access journals - one metric of the importance and prestige of a publication - appear to be on the rise.

If you're interested in learning more about open access, Peter Suber provides a good overview. For more specific instructions on how to participate, Jonathan Eisen, chair of the advisory board for the non-profit, open access publisher Public Library of Science, has two blog posts:

Of course, open access isn't a panacea. Librarians at MBL-WHOI Library warn that authors should be on the look-out for predatory open access journals.

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