So….
Utopian Dream or Unstoppable Force?
This topic was rather new to me at first, getting to know that such free content and information online is known as ‘Open Access’.
Having read many blogs by my peers, it is rather obvious that many of us have the same view on free, open access to contents online. I would like to point out to Novina’s and Patricia’s post where they heavily emphasise on the monetary cost of paying online information. In Novina’s post, she believe that Open Access should be subsidised and I agree to her discussion totally. Firstly, it helps to reciprocate to the authors’ effort in providing such great information to the ‘world’. Secondly, students, researchers and educators get to improvise and work on new findings to keep the society going and sustain communication. I believe as long as institutions educate students on how to appropriate use and cite information from the web like what we are doing right now, the disadvantages can be overlooked and minimised.
On the other hand, I thought Patricia’s view was another alternative to manage Open Access, which is to only implement paywalls on certain content. High priced contents could probably be subsidized and used in institutional portals like Singapore Institute of Management and Harvard University. In a report by Sample, I. in 2012, he claims that Harvard no longer can afford journal publishers’ prices. This was in view with the boycott of Elsevier by more 10,000 institutions because of the high priced journals and access policies. Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition mentioned that Harvard’s new adoption is likely to encourage many other universities to keep their research freely and available. Afterall, it is Harvard we are talking about. People watch them.
Lastly, I am still in favour with Open Policy after doing a thorough research and reading many of my peers’ post. There is no need for articles to be hidden behind paywalls as long as creators and users are responsible and aware of their own actions. I feel that advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages in many ways especially to those developing countries.
We may be blessed by technology and free information to learn and grow, but NOT everyone is.
*I specifically like Aetiiqcaz’s and Corrine’s post with their customized slides and video 🙂
Cheerios.
REFERENCES:
The Gurdian, Sample, I., 2012. Harvard Universities says it can’t Afford Journal Publishers’ Prices. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices [Accessed on 10 December 2014]
Clark, L,. 2014. How ‘Google Science’ could transform academic publishing? [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-08/13/google-science-would-we-need-it [Accessed on 10 December 2014]
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