Topic 5: Reflection on Open Access
This week the topic shifted slightly in its outlook from how we work and integrate ourselves into using the web, to ethical dilemmas faced by grad students and the education system worldwide in regards to open access information online, with the web once again acting as a gateway to giving possible solutions.
Reading the posts of others on the subject drew my attention to different sides of this debate. Namat’s blog made me consider the ethics of health related papers not being available to the general public, and that even within the debate between having papers open access or not, whether papers that could have an immediate beneficial impact in the field of healthcare should follow a different set of rules than a more general theoretical paper. Furthermore this made me consider why we could not implement a system whereby individuals were able to read all papers online, but it was only if they wished to draw on those papers and reference them, that they should need to possibly compensate the original article author or not. While it is far from being complete, a system such as IDEA’s (1) (click on citations) where papers’ citations are clearly and publicly shown could already give us a framework for such a system, which if implemented perhaps in a Wikipedia-esque manner, albeit with more controls, could create a hub for scientific papers and interaction worldwide.
Tatiana’s post, meanwhile made me consider how we are rapidly facing a different landscape on the web where once free content is finding ways to integrate paid elements into their respective systems. One could even consider this an effective business model whereby one initially reached the largest audience possible, who made using your product a part of their daily routine, only to later introduce paid aspects. In this way you already have a large user base, and therefore may in fact receive more paying customers than if in that period you had been providing a paid good all along…
The restriction to papers and resources online could also cause an overlap of ideas and work, where two separate researchers were unable to access each others paid articles therefore rendering one paper in part or totally obsolete, further pointing to open access to theoretical work online being a priority as the field of education moves forward.
Words: 386
Comments:
https://namatsadiqee.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/open-access-the-good-and-the-bad/comment-page-1/#comment-33
https://tatianasieff.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/imagine-if-this-blog-cost-you-10-to-read/comment-page-1/#comment-42
Source:
(1) IDEAS: https://ideas.repec.org/p/kie/kieliw/1622.html
