On Friday, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he’d apparently hanged himself. Swartz was only 26, a brilliant and troubled young man who suffered from clinical depression, and also an Internet activist who spoke out and acted out in favor of making access to public information more free to everyone. He was a friend of both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow. Swartz’s other accomplishments include RECAP, a tool that uploaded public-domain legal documents retrieved from the subscription-based PACER document record system into a duplicate free-access database. He was also reportedly involved in the early stages of...

I ran across an interesting pair of articles concerning academic journal indexes—a complaint about the journals' expense and inaccessibility by Laura McKenna in The Atlantic, and a rebuttal pointing out a number of errors and misconceptions in McKenna’s article by Nancy Sims of the University of Minnesota Libraries on her blog. At the heart of McKenna’s complaint is the often outlandish pricing for individual articles found on some of these journals, such as JSTOR. She brings up the example of a charge of $38 for a 12-page article. McKenna posts an explanation for this state of affairs that involves...

From a JSTOR Announcement: On September 6, 2011, we announced that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world.  This “Early Journal Content” includes discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and politics, and in mathematics and other sciences.  It includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the content on JSTOR. While JSTOR currently provides access to scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than...

From a Chronicle of Higher Education Post by Jennifer Howard: [JSTOR] has struck agreements with four publishers—Princeton University Press, the University of Chicago Press, the University of Minnesota Press, and the University of North Carolina Press—to make their books available online next year. The e-books program, "Books at JSTOR," was announced today at the American Library Association’s Midwinter meeting in San Diego, according to a JSTOR spokesperson. Read the Complete Article Via Resource Shelf...