[ExI] The best tribute to Aaron Swartz

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Tue Jan 15 15:03:39 UTC 2013


If you are a scientist, you can pay the best and most effective tribute to
the memory of Aaron Swartz <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz>, by
sharing PDFs of your published work on pdftribute.net via the hashtag
#pdftribute <https://twitter.com/search/%23pdftribute> on Twitter.

I also suggest to boycott the pay-walled journals of the science mafia and
publish on arXiv <http://arxiv.org/>, or one of the many excellent open
access science journals like *PLoS<http://www.plos.org/publications/journals/>
* and *eLife <http://www.elifesciences.org/>*. Hit them in the wallet where
it hurts, it is the only effective way to protest.

*New Scientist<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23075-activists-death-sparks-openaccess-tribute-on-twitter.html>
* | Hundreds of researchers have been sharing PDFs of their work on Twitter
as a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the internet freedom activist who committed
suicide on Friday.

Swartz was facing hacking charges from the US government after accessing
the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading
nearly 5 million articles from the digital library JSTOR<http://www.jstor.org/>
.

Academics are now offering open-access versions of their work using the
hashtag #pdftribute <https://twitter.com/search/%23pdftribute> in memory of
Swartz and building a collection of papers at pdftribute.net.

In a statement following his death, Swartz’s parents criticised the
Massachusetts US attorney’s office for pursuing charges against their son,
and MIT for failing to support him. [NOTE - see also *Time* | Aaron
Swartz’s Suicide Prompts MIT
Soul-Searching.<http://business.time.com/2013/01/14/mit-orders-review-of-aaron-swartz-suicide-as-soul-searching-begins/>
]

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, tweeted his own
tribute<https://twitter.com/timberners_lee/status/290140454211698689>:
“Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right,
we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us
weep.”<http://terasemvision.com/2013/01/15/the-best-tribute-to-aaron-swartz/#>
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