AUSTIN - Four decades after the Pentagon Papers began appearing in The New York Times, triggering a constitutional crisis over freedom of the press, the once top-secret study of the Vietnam War is being released.

The Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas in Austin will unveil the 7,000-page Pentagon report Monday, with only 11 words remaining secret.

Simultaneous releases are scheduled at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

The Times began publishing the documents June 13, 1971, but a federal judge soon halted their publication. Other newspapers then began publishing the documents.

A fragmented US Supreme Court eventually struck down the judge's ruling, leading to a major legal victory for press freedom.

The 7,000-page report was the WikiLeaks disclosure of its time, a sensational breach of government confidentiality that shook Richard Nixon's presidency and prompted a Supreme Court fight that advanced press freedom. Prepared near the end of Lyndon Johnson's term by Defense Department and private foreign policy analysts, the report was leaked primarily by one of them, Daniel Ellsberg, in a brash act of defiance that stands as one of the most dramatic episodes of whistleblowing in US history.

On Monday, the National Archives and presidential libraries are releasing the report in full, long after most of its secrets had spilled. The release is timed 40 years to the day after The New York Times published the first in its series of stories about the findings, on June 13, 1971. The papers showed that the Johnson, Kennedy and prior administrations had been escalating the conflict in Vietnam while misleading Congress, the public and allies.

As scholars pore over the 47-volume report, Ellsberg says the chance of them finding great new revelations are dim. Most of it has come out in congressional forums and by other means, and Ellsberg plucked out the best when he painstakingly photocopied pages that he spirited from a safe night after night, and returned in the mornings. He told The Associated Press the value in Monday's release was in having the entire study finally brought together and put online, giving today's generations ready access to it.