The 19 July indictment of activist and ethics researcher Aaron Swartz, who downloaded more than 4 million articles from the academic journal archive JSTOR, unleashed a ferment of support for the principle that research papers should be freely available. Unremarked so far is that the proportion of research papers freely available is increasing (see chart) thanks to public-access mandates by governments and funding agencies, and the success of open-access publishers. See go.nature.com/gmpdbq for more.
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