Honouring Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist

Digital rights advocate's death places spotlight on more open access to info.

The Internet community has been reeling for the past week as it grapples with the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a prominent digital rights activist who left a remarkable legacy for a 26-year-old. Swartz's contributions are used by millions of people every day as he played a key role in developing the specifications for RSS (which makes it easy to syndicate online content), Creative Commons licenses (which makes is easy to make creative works freely available), and the popular website Reddit.

While much of the immediate focus has centered on mental health issues, draconian computer crime laws, and the bewildering prosecution of Swartz for downloading millions of academic articles -- a U.S. prosecutor was seeking as much as 35 years in jail despite the fact that Swartz did not benefit from the downloads and the source of the articles did not want to pursue legal action -- the more notable legacy was his effort to make information more openly and freely available.

In recent months, there have been some important developments in Canada in furthering Swartz's vision. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal government's health research funding agency, recently launched a new open access policy that requires funded researchers to make their peer-reviewed publications freely available within 12 months of publication. Given the millions of tax dollars invested in CIHR research annually, the mandatory open access policy should ensure that the public has access to the cutting-edge health research it has helped fund...