Letters: Aaron Swartz, hero of the Web

Re “To some, he’s a martyr in fight to open research on Web to all,” Business, Jan. 30

Many of my academic colleagues sneer at Wikipedia articles — understandably based on readily available online information — for their factual errors and lack of appropriate citations. At the same time, they continue to support a model of scholarly publishing that prices online access to their work at $20 or more per article for those without university affiliations.

Hopefully, the legal persecution and suicide of Aaron Swartz, who faced prison time for downloading and then distributing academic journal articles, will change some minds in fields such as mine (anthropology) that have clung stubbornly to old, exclusionary models.

John M. Norvell

Claremont

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