Twitter Campaign '#pdftribute' Roars to Life In Tribute to Aaron Swartz. As mourning turns to frustration following the untimely death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz Friday, a number of researchers and supporters – activists in their own right – are taking to Twitter to participate in a large protest as a reaction to Swartz's suicide.
The online event, running under the hashtag #pdftribute, has thousands of users contributing links to academic papers – regardless of whether they technically have permission due to the papers' copyrights – as a virtual representation of Swartz's beliefs in the availability of information in the academic world. "Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. "Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. #PDFTribute list of documents. Academics Are Tweeting Out PDFs of Journal Articles in Memory of Aaron Swartz.
Academics share copyrighted journal articles on Twitter to honor Aaron Swartz. This morning, hundreds of links to copyright-protected journal articles have appeared on Twitter in remembrance of Aaron Swartz, posted by members of the academic community.
The call to the protest appears to have started on Reddit, where researcher Micah Allen said, "a fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles. Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link. Think of the great blu-ray encoding protest but on a bigger scale for research articles. " Early this morning the Anonymous Twitter account also announced its support for the action. Please share: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz using hashtag #pdftribute #ICYMI — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 13, 2013 Swartz, who hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment this past Friday, had been under federal indictment since 2011.
An expert witness has argued that Swartz's actions hardly called for the criminal charges brought against him. Photo credit: Quinn Norton. Researchers honor Swartz's memory with PDF protest. In a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who committed suicide Friday, researchers have begun posting PDFs to Twitter to honor his campaign for open access.
Swartz, 26, had faced the possibility of $4 million in fines and more than 50 years in prison for allegedly stealing 4 million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jstor, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. The authorities claimed that he broke into a restricted-access computer wiring closet at MIT and accessed that network without authorization. The PDF campaign was born out of a desire to honor Swartz's memory and his battle for open access to documents on the Internet, said Micah Allen, a researcher in the fields of brain plasticity, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive science. "A fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles," Allen wrote yesterday on Reddit. "Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link.
Ten simple ways to share PDFs of your papers #PDFtribute.