Aaron Swartz: Opening Access to Knowledge

Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide after downloading 4 million articles from JSTOR and got charged with 13 felony offenses. The writer Pamela Samuelson argues that charges against Aaron was necessary but Aaron’s mission or goal was worthy. Many JSTOR articles were funded through research grants and governments and foundations, so Aaron had no idea that he didn’t have to pay for it. Even articles are not covered by which listed above, some articles written by university professors are covered by their salary. And JSTOR were written by scholars to share the knowledge. Pamela argues that copyright is being an obstacle to knowledge and articles like JSTOR should be open-access for scholarly work.

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