A PDF TRIBUTE. The hashtag #pdftribute promotes the spread of free research information in light of Aaron Swartz' death. Screen shot from Twitter.

MANILA, Philippines - Aaron Swartz' death has sparked its own bit of change among researchers online.

Following Swartz' death and the reactions that have sprung up as a result, some researchers have started an initiative on Twitter to make their research available for people to download and learn from at their leisure.

The initiative, which appears to have been started by Eva Vivalt (@evavivalt) and Jessica Richman (@venturejessica), is known through the hashtag #pdftribute.

Researchers who wish to make their research publicly available can tweet a link to their publicly available research with the hashtag, and it will get picked up on the PDF Tribute website.

As of Vivalt's last count, there were 40 million impressions and 15,000 tweets using the hashtag.

While the PDF tribute website does index tweets with research information, it makes no distinction between tweets of support and tweets with publicly available research, so users will want to wait for a full repository of the archived research to be available.

In the meantime, Vivalt has made a partial repository available for interested parties to check. - Rappler.com

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