JSTOR Releases Documents and Summary of Its Role in Swartz Case

JSTOR, the digital-journal archive, has released all the documents it provided to federal prosecutors relating to the case of Aaron Swartz, the activist and Harvard University researcher.

Mr. Swartz, who committed suicide in January, faced criminal charges after downloading 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR in 2010 in defiance of the archive’s terms of service. He used a laptop hidden in a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Although JSTOR did not pursue legal action against Mr. Swartz, and said publicly that it had “no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter,” the organization continued to supply documents to the U.S. attorney’s office under subpoena as authorities sought to make a federal case against Mr. Swartz under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

JSTOR’s release came on the heels of MIT’s publishing the findings of an internal investigation into its own role in the Swartz case. That report found that MIT, like JSTOR, had not encouraged the federal prosecution of Mr. Swartz.

The MIT report included a lengthy narrative of the events surrounding the Swartz affair. JSTOR published its own “summary of events” along with the documents.