A 31-year-old American who says his name is Gregory Maxwell has posted a 32GB file containing 18,592 scientific articles to BitTorrent. In a lengthy statement posted to the Pirate Bay, he says that Tuesday's arrest of onetime Reddit co-owner Aaron Swartz inspired the document release.

"All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge—as their lofty mission statements suggest—but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does," he wrote.

Maxwell says he is a technologist living in the Washington, DC area. He tells Ars that "I'm not an academic, but I sometimes play one on the Internet. I am a hobbyist scientist and many of the things I work on leave me often consuming scientific papers."

He rarely has trouble gaining access to the documents he needs because "my social circle is stuffed full of academics." But he worries that others who aren't as well connected will have trouble getting access to academic research.

It's safe to say that Swartz would approve of Maxwell's actions. In a 2008 "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" first reported by the New York Times, Swartz wrote that "we need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks."

Maxwell says the documents he released were all published before 1923, which means that they should be in the public domain under US copyright law. He says he acquired the documents through "rather boring and lawful means," and wanted to publish them on a public site such as Wikisource. However, he worried that incumbent publishers would "claim that their slavish reproduction—scanning the documents—created a new copyright interest."

This is not an unreasonable fear. Publishers of public domain works have long argued that token modifications to public domain works could transform them into copyrighted works.

So for "a long time," Maxwell opted not to publish the documents. But now, in the wake of Swartz's arrest, Maxwell says he feels that was the wrong decision.

"If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified—it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge."

Swartz and Maxwell's actions are part of a broader campaign to open up public access to academic work. In February, the prominent computer security researcher Matt Blaze blasted ACM and IEEE, the two most important professional societies in his profession, for restrictive copyright policies.

"I will no longer serve as a program chair, program committee member, editorial board member, referee or reviewer for any conference or journal that does not make its papers freely available on the Web or at least allow authors to do so themselves," Blaze wrote. He called on his fellow academics to join him. Ironically, the faculty of MIT—where Swartz allegedly did his downloading—made a similar pledge in 2009.