Pamela Samuelson writes for San Francisco Chronicle, January 25, 2013
What was Internet activist Aaron Swartz thinking when he downloaded 4 million articles from JSTOR (short for journal storage), a digital library of scholarly articles, in a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Because of his suicide this month, we will never know for sure, but one consistent theme ran through his short but brilliant career: The Internet provides amazing opportunities to open more access to knowledge. And he wanted to help that process.