'Open access' tributes to Aaron Swartz COMPUTER HACKING

Aaron Swartz, shown in 2009 in Miami Beach, committed suicide Friday. He was facing federal charges for hacking. Aaron Swartz, shown in 2009 in Miami Beach, committed suicide Friday. He was facing federal charges for hacking. Photo: Michael Francis McElroy, Associated Press Photo: Michael Francis McElroy, Associated Press Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close 'Open access' tributes to Aaron Swartz 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The suicide of hacker and digital activist Aaron Swartz has prompted academics from around the globe to post their research online for free, and led the university involved in Swartz's prosecution to launch an investigation into its own role in events leading to his death.

By late on Monday, more than 30,000 messages on the social media website Twitter contained the hashtag #pdftribute, notating them as tributes to Swartz's memory. Many of the tweets featured links to researchers' work in fields ranging from intellectual property law to medicine.

Advocates of the "open access" to journals advocated by Swartz are hoping the #pdftribute campaign could help further the cause of researchers publishing in journals that keep their papers open to the public, rather than requiring payments.

"It's likely that papers shared this way will become highly visible in search engines ... and (academics) will release more scholarly literature to the general public," said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Civic Media.

Also Monday, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit online library in San Francisco, opened the Aaron Swartz Collection for people to upload computer code and other projects they'd worked on with Swartz.

Federal charges

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing federal charges of accessing MIT's computing network without authorization and lifting papers from a digital library there.

The grassroots tribute movement started over the weekend, following Swartz's suicide on Friday. The gesture was then promoted by such online activist groups as the hacker collective Anonymous and Stanford University's Program on Liberation Technology.

Swartz had been one of the Internet's most vocal and active critics of closed information, especially that kept private by the U.S. government, and had developed a Robin Hood-like reputation for obtaining big stores of information and providing it to the public for free. Swartz believed that most research that was funded by taxpayer dollars should be open to anyone.

Academic papers can have tricky copyright regulations, depending how the papers are published. Leading academics, like UC Davis biologist Jonathan Eisen, reinforced the #pdftribute movement with guidance on how to publish papers to "open-access" journals rather than more restrictive publications.

Eisen, for instance, publishes all of his lab's research with open-access journals and has asked researchers to avoid non-open-access journals for both publishing and reviewing.

'Open access' not perfect

Yet, while many younger academics may agree with "open access" in concept, the construct of the university tenure system and the desire to gain notoriety make it difficult for them to follow through on that philosophy. Papers appearing in big-name academic journals, such as Nature, are instrumental in helping a new professor reach tenure. Few open-access journals have that kind of clout.

Eisen says institutions relying on the reputation of the journals that tenure candidates are published in, rather than vetting the candidate's work themselves, is the root of the problem.

"What we should be doing is actually evaluating academics for their contributions - not using flawed surrogates," he says.

Eisen, who has more than 14,000 followers on Twitter, acknowledges that if academia were to go that route, researchers would have to advertise their own work more vigorously, through blogs and social media.

Depression, stress

At the time of his death, Swartz, who had battled depression, was facing the threat of a million-dollar fine and more than 30 years in jail for accessing JSTOR, an online repository of academic papers, and copying millions of documents. Many, including Swartz's family, said the stress from the government's charges led to him taking his own life at age 26.

Officials at JSTOR had worked out a deal in which Swartz returned the documents, and had "no interest" in the government's charges against Swartz. MIT, though, continued to work with prosecutors over Swartz's use of its computers to access the JSTOR documents.

MIT president L. Rafael Reif wrote a letter Monday expressing the school's condolences and pledging to open an investigation into the Massachusetts school's role in Swartz's case.

Ironically, just days before Swartz's suicide, JSTOR announced it would open up free, limited access to 1,200 academic journals in its possession.