Topic 5: Reflective Summary of Open Access
Topic 5 was the more outstanding topic that all students wanted to discuss. I am saying outstanding because the issue of open access was something that students maybe faced everyday when they tried to access some of the academic materials that they needed. I personally found it really frustrating whenever I wasn’t authorized to access journal articles for free. I was not alone to share my frustration about producers not let us access their materials for free. Reading other students blog, they also had similar arguments as me about advantages of free access. Andrew stated that “Open access allows everyone the ethical right and equal access to the latest expert knowledge, and it saves organisations like universities millions of pounds”. However when I looked at the argument from the producers point of view, end of the day their materials should pay them back as they have spend their time and money producing, and providing them to the world for free is just not logical.
Reading other contributors blog really broaden my knowledge about advantages and disadvantages of producers make their materials freely available. The advantages I bulleted on my blog was directly focused to the producers, while Andrew also listed some really interesting advantages, however it was not convicting for me, because I couldn’t see how it might benefit personally the producers.
I also came across a really interesting blog from May. I agreed with her that free access open huge opportunely for everyone especially for us students to stay updated with knowledge and information, however it concerned me because producers cant keep producing and making it available for us for free as it cost them. This will affect quantity and quality of information in the feature, which is a big disadvantage for everyone on the other hand.
Comments
https://maybulmanontheweb.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/the-paywall-online-press-going-awol/
