Topic 5: Reflective Summary
This week’s topic on the advantages and disadvantages of Open Access for the content producer generated some interesting thoughts amongst fellow UOSM2008 students. It additionally prompted several of us to try new ways of presenting our blog posts: Prezis, SlideShares and videos were abundant!
What stood out the most this week was the overwhelmingly positive response to Open Access. I was not alone in sharing my frustration at restricted access to articles. Tat, for example, voiced her annoyance at being faced with a hefty price tag for a journal article she needed to read, whilst Bartosz similarly covered the hypocrisy of funding, and the notion that content producers are denying themselves citations by continuing with closed access. Both Tat and I held similar opinions with regards to Open Access: we both saw its advantages not only as students, but to those across the globe, including the author.
Whilst my blog post focused on the academic content producer, Nicole’s blog post addressed the open access to music via online streaming services, just as May’s, similarly, focused on open access in journalism. As a long-term user of Spotify, I felt I could relate and respond to Nicole’s post. We mutually agreed that the music industry was far more vulnerable to exploitation and illegal downloads, and can never fully be ‘restricted’ in the same way as academic journals.
This week’s topic definitely required the most research during this module. However, I was excited to discover that the Higher Education Funding Council for England will require future research to be open access after April 2016 in order to qualify for funding. For a topic I had little knowledge of before this blog post, I was surprised at how strongly I felt about it!
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Blogs I commented on:
Nicole’s: https://nicoleodofin.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/should-online-content-be-free-or-should-we-pay-a-fee/
Tat’s: https://tatianasieff.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/imagine-if-this-blog-cost-you-10-to-read/
