[liberationtech] Tragic News: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

[Maxim Kammerer]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 10:25 PM, Samuel Carlisle
<samuelcarlisle at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please Upload your Academic Papers to the web and tweet the links with
> #pdftribute

This might be a suitable time to create an .onion resource that is
actually good for the world — a gigapedia / library.nu clone that
can't be shut down. A lot of hard work, not as glamorous as yet
another crowdsourcing-cloud-whatever activism app , and necessarily
anonymous, but the impact is hard to underestimate. Such a resource
could easily outshine all the garbage that presently populates
.onion-land, and you only need to read online comments from
third-world researchers / students mourning gigapedia demise to
understand the true potential.

> 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

This is probably a pointless gesture — academics can already post
their own papers online, whether permitted by the publisher or not. I
don't think a publisher ever went after such cases, since they know
this would cause a boycott from the academic community (a real one,
not the rare and privileged “I am not publishing in closed-access
journals” one).

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte