There’s been a pretty big outpouring of grief following Aaron Swartz’s suicide, even from those who didn’t actually know him. And the trend is continuing. Many researchers and academics are now tweeting links to PDF files of their papers as a tribute.
At the time of his death, Swartz had been facing charges for attempting to publicly release academic papers from JSTOR, and in a statement, his family accuses the intensity of the charges for contributing in part to his suicide. The show of support, consolidated under the hashtag #pdftribute, now involves hundreds of participants working to make hundreds (if not more) papers freely available to the public, much as Swartz had been trying to do.
There’s yet to be any consolidated archive of the links or PDFs, but chatter on Twitter suggests that there are multiple parties trying to organise one. The hashtag is now getting over 500 tweets per hour, so rounding up all those links could prove to be difficult, but even with no hub of articles (yet), the tribute is making a splash. [Neuroconscience via Techmeme)