TOPIC – 5 Reflective Summary

Before I encountered this topic of Open Access (OA) I was absolutely clear and convinced that when something comes to you for free then it is always good and OA was one of them [1].

Upon doing this topic, I then started seeing the other side of the coin through reading others people’s blogs and comments. I found there are good debates on Bartosz Paszcza’s Blog [2] and I start wondering. So why do people give you something for free though? What can I do with it? Where can I use it? & Why should I use it? All these questions led me to learn more about OA, I then came across Namat Sadiqee’s Blog [3] and his blog reminded me of Wikipedia.org or WordPress.com etc. as they are all somehow related to OA because it allows users to publish their content for free [4].

Out of reading their blogs they both put some advantages and disadvantages overall but I think in general, from my own analysis and their examples the advantages outweighs the disadvantages.

Now the issue is if something is free then users would see this during their first point of their research findings but however not all have valid references. Explained in the video below [5].

Although Bartosz and Namat argue on their Blogs that OA gives better access to contents. What I know from personal experience is that because of the enormous amount of free articles all around the place that users have access to, finding real and quality contents will be hard as they have to spend lot of time and use their own knowledge & experience to analyze what information they can trust on and what not.

With this understanding we could identify the most difficult problem. It all depends on personal choice of where and when to use OA and with this blog hopefully now it’s clear where we can use OA and where not [6].

References

[1] https://www.plos.org/open-access/

[2] https://paszcza.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/open-access/

[3] https://namatsadiqee.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/open-access-the-good-and-the-bad/

[4] https://ithemes.com/tutorials/what-is-wordpress/

[5] http://library.williams.edu/citing/wikipedia.php