Yesterday, as I was completing my morning coffee and internet ritual, @le_feufollet broke the sad news to me of Aaron Swartz’s death. Aaron was a leader online, a brilliant coder and developer, and sadly a casualty in the fight for freedom of information. He was essential in the development of two tools I use every day (RSS and Reddit), and though his guerilla attempt to upload all papers on JSTOR was perhaps unstrategic, it was certainly noble enough in cause. Before his death Aaron was facing nearly 35 years in prison for his role in the JSTOR debacle, an insane penalty for attempting to share information. We don’t know why Aaron chose to take his life, but when @la_feufollet and I tried to brainstorm a tribute to him, my first thought was a guerilla PDF uploading campaign in honor of his fight for open access. I’m not much of an organizer, so I posted in one of the many rising reddit threads and hoped for the best:

My posts on reddit are usually ignored, so I went about my business and assumed it was the last i’d hear of it. It was amazing to wake up this morning and see that redditors had responded strongly to the idea and that a flood of tweets tagged #pdftribute had appeared:

As far as I can tell early this morning Anonymous took the initiative and tweeted with the hashtag. Eva Vivalt and Jessica Richman took the initiative to think up the #pdftribute hashtag, and helped bring anonymous onboard. Currently there are hundreds thousands of authors posting their PDFs. It’s amazing to see that the original promise of the internet – the spread of ideas- is thriving. Lately i’ve been feeling a bit pessimistic, worried that the net was becoming an overly gamed, astroturf-ridden meme-preserve for advertisers to groom to their financial needs. It’s great to see that the most exciting power of our newfound connectivity- driving ideas to spread freely and have impact without the restrictions of traditional hierarchical barriers- continues to thrive. I hope #pdftribute lives on in both force and spirit, and that we can all begin working toward a world in which all publicly funded research is available to anyone with net access.

UPDATE 13/1/13 4:00 EST:

For those of you who don’t feel comfortable violating your copyright, but want to join in #pdftribute, your best bet is to check the specifics of your publisher agreement. Most journals allow you to upload a pre-print manuscript to your personal website. Then you can go ahead and tweet the link to your website or the individual pre-print PDFs. Jonathan Eisen has a helpful list of 10 ways to post your papers on twitter here.

Otherwise, hide in the swarm today as a show of support for Aaron. By standing together we show that the future of research publishing is freedom of information. But tomorrow remember that we need to push through real copright reform. You can start by reading Aaron’s wonderful Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. If you are ready to commit to open access, you can sign the petition at http://thecostofknowledge.com/. There is also this We The People petition demanding legislation requiring journals to use an open-access publishing model Woops that petition has expired- start a new one!. As Matthew Green put it, lets push for an Aaron Swartz copyright reform act.

UPDATE 1:

Some nice folks have put together a link scraper to collect PDFs tagged #pdftribute here:

UPDATE 2:

If I may make a humble suggestion- it may be useful to follow a specific format for sharing your papers. This will make them easier to find later, and for journalists to compile some sharing stats. Here is my suggested example.

UPDATE 3:

Eva Vivalt reports #pdftribute getting 500 tweets/hr, >2.5 million impressions!