Tag Archives: Swartz

HW 10/7/13

Basically this article “Opening access to knowledge” discuss a very popular problem today. Why should students pay for educational materials that are needed for the class or some project. Sometimes student pay that money for nothing. Author does not understand ,why student should pay twice for material that was written mostly by university professors for student education. One of those companies is JSTOR, they provide educational materials that suppose to be free ,for money. JSTOR has provided an important service to academic and other research communities by scanning back issues of journals and offering subscriptions to research institutions,but this storehouse of knowledge is not as openly available as Swartz apparently thought it should be. He downloaded 4 million articles from the JSTORE in only one purpose ,to show to the government and rest of the country ,that educational material must be free for students.Federal prosecutors decided to charge him with 13 felony offenses,which lead him to commit a suicide.

Aaron Swartz

How is America suppose to grow if the there are limits to the knowledge that we have access to? Aaron Swartz, the 26 year old who had committed suicide after an extensive and relentless case against him rose because he wanted others to have access to scholarly documents that we should have all been able to read. The author of the article, Aaron Swartz: Opening access to knowledge, Pamela Samuelson, choose to agree with Swartz (from what I presumed). Samuelson lists plenty of good reasons as to why Swartz may have decided to do what he had because the articles that could have been founded through JSTOR were already supplied because of research grants from the government and foundations. Most of the articles were published my the universities professors and we all have an idea as to how much a person with a Ph. D earns. As Samuelson states, maybe Swartz thought that the public was owed access to it. Such a sad way to start the new year when a 26 year old man decided to hang himself because he was only providing the public with knowledge that should be shared with everyone.