ON A FRIGID DAY in January 2011, a surveillance camera captured footage of a young man sneaking into a wiring closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Once inside, he retrieved a laptop he'd plugged into the university's network.
To Swartz and his supporters in the "open access" movement, this was a noble crime. The taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the world's largest funder of biomedical research. Researchers are not paid for the articles they write for scholarly journals, nor for the time and expertise they donate by peer-reviewing and serving on editorial boards. Yet the publishers claim copyright to the researchers' work and charge hefty fees for access to it. (The average subscription to a biology journal costs $2,163.)
Swartz had intended to place the pilfered papers on file-sharing networks, free for the taking. Instead, he was arrested and charged with multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 law written with WarGames-style hacking and Cold War espionage in mind. Facing decades in federal prison, the 26-year-old, who'd struggled with depression for years, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment in January.
In the days following the suicide, commentators angrily pointed fingers at federal prosecutors and MIT for pursuing Swartz. But Michael Eisen, a respected fruit fly geneticist at the University of California-Berkeley, reserved a portion of the blame for his peers. Noting how sympathetic scientists had memorialized Swartz by posting free copies of their articles online, he wrote on his popular blog, it is NOT junk, "It is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive."
By then, the 46-year-old Eisen had already spent most of his career leading a frontal assault on the very status quo that Swartz had tried to subvert. More than a decade ago, he helped launch the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a series of journals with a groundbreaking business model: All of its content is immediately published online, free and ready to be shared, critiqued, analyzed, and expanded upon in the spirit of true academic inquiry.
This radical approach was designed to undermine the traditional publishers of science journals
