Stand up and vote: for and against the Open Access
The topic of Open Access has sparked interesting contributions from blog’s Authors. Firstly, although in general it seems everyone appreciated the idea of Open Science, some legitimate voices of concern were raised.
Secondly, there seemed to be a division in terms of post topics, with the largest group focusing on Open Access in Academia, while the rest of students wrote about same notion applied more generally to content on the Web (especially journalism).
There were two blog posts which positively distinguished themselves from others in terms of writing style. Sarah Kyle’s article managed to catch the attention of the reader by introducing the topic with a personal story of a failure of an inter-library book loan. Then, she went on to show detailed descriptions of for-and-against arguments in form of a presentation, which looks more appealing than a simple block of text.
Tamara Manton continued her experiments with video-blogging, with a magnificent result. She mastered both the visual and voice side of the video, making it into an engaging and insightful introduction. The text which followed the video focused in the issues with Intellectual Property in Open Access publication. By boldly stating her own point of view on the issue, she managed to ignite an interesting discussion, which (for me) is one of the points of the ‘Living on the Web’ module and blogging in general.
Another interesting debate surrounded the topic of applicability of Open Access to journalism and the emergence of paywalls. Clearly there is a difference: media companies suffer losses due to drop of newspaper sales and low online incomes. Unlike science, media are not funded by state and have to somehow make money on their articles. May Bulman wrote about the development of the pay-to-access system and the fact that its introduction may block access to multiple viewpoints and different opinions, impeding one of the most interesting features of the Web. Nicole wrote about similar issue, applied to music industry and managed to show a range of innovative proposed solutions to the issue, such as Tidal or Spotify.
My comments:
1. May’s blog
