The Hindu : Sci-Tech / Internet : Of Aaron Swartz, open access and #PDF tributes

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-15

Summary:

On Saturday, the open Internet lost one of its most passionate and talented champions, one who spoke up often against the inequalities of information flow and access on its World Wide Web. Aaron Swartz, all of 26, committed suicide as a result of depression, which many believe was triggered by the federal charges he was facing for hacking into the JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) academic database in 2011. Back then, Swartz had downloaded millions of academic research papers from the subscription database and planned to release them for free. In 2008, he had pulled off a similar hack with public court documents. Swartz was first noticed when he co-authored the RSS standard (for feeds) at 14, soon after which he became a tireless crusader for free access on the web. He was the chief architect of OpenLibrary.org, a free public catalogue of books under the Internet Archive project, an early member of the Creative Commons team, and more recently, led a successful campaign against two key legislations -- SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) – that sought to clamp down on intellectual property rights violations online. The common thread that ran through all the causes he took up and fought for was his political thought and conviction that 'information is power' and that in a digital world it was important to fight what he saw as privatisation of knowledge and information. Some of this he puts down in his 'Guerilla Open Access Manifesto' where he implores academics to declare their opposition to what he calls the 'private theft of public culture' ... So in a fitting tribute on Monday, academics across the world paid tribute to this legendary hacker and advocate of a free and equal Internet by putting up PDFs of their copyrighted works online. On the micro-blogging site Twitter, the hashtag #PDFTribute trended all day, triggering a progressive and open debate on copyright, academic work and access.  All the more relevant in the context of a developing country like India, many complained that outside university networks, it was impossible to access academic works. Though few Indian professors were seen participating, the Indian academic journal, Economic and Political Weekly, showed its solidarity to the free and open access movement by releasing at least eight academic papers that were otherwise behind its pay wall. Most of what was released was papers topical or relevant on subjects such as cash transfers, and on Internet freedom and open access..."

Link:

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/aaron-swartz-trends-all-day-on-the-net/article4307697.ece

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.licensing oa.comment oa.legislation oa.copyright oa.india oa.social_media oa.twitter oa.litigation oa.open_library oa.rss oa.ia oa.pipa oa.jstor oa.guerrilla oa.ospa oa.libre oa.south

Date tagged:

01/15/2013, 17:23

Date published:

01/15/2013, 12:23