RIP, Aaron Swartz, And Why Open-Access Matters

Why the untimely death of an advocate for open access matters to you

Last week, 26-year-old Aaron Swartz hanged himself. Swartz was a champion of open everything: open access code, open access journals, and fought for a utopian version of the internet. In that utopian version of the internet, people have access to information, and freedom of speech trumps SOPA and other draconian copyright laws. There are many roundups about Swartz, so I won't rehash the news that's available elsewhere online.

At the time of his death, Swartz was facing 30 years in jail and a $1 million fine for downloading and distributing four million articles from academic journals. Last year, I wrote an article on "How to Find What You're Not Looking For" for Scientific American, which highlighted ways that our online information habits can lead to unexpected scientific discoveries. I interviewed plenty of researchers, hoping to understand the fundamentals of scientific discovery and serendipity...

Instead, I became really passionate about the idea of open-access publishing for academic journals. If you've ever tried to access the PDF of a study published in a scientific journal, only to discover that you need a subscription to Elsevier, JSTOR, EBSCOhost, or any other database, you understand the complexities involved in tracking down good data...