In this blog I am going to write about what open access and
how it benefits certain groups of people more than others. Firstly I have to
start off by explaining what open access is, from what I understand. Open
access is a movement where “literature is digital, online, free of charge, and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Quote from http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/open_access/about.html.
As you read on in the passage it further explains precisely how this program
could be used by students just like me to, find out research material such as
files and, multimedia files.
I personally think that open access would be great for not
just students but also, academics and, professionals such as doctors and nurse
all over the globe to help provide them with the latest knowledge and, the easy
access of it being available online. It sounds like such a great idea to me and
you would have to think why hasn’t it been done yet? Because the writers and
the publishers obviously won’t receive any financial gain, clearly doing it out
the kindness of their heart isn’t good enough. It could potentially cripple
many businesses as they would just be losing money, rather than making it. Also there could be the case that academics
have been used to be writing books in their traditional way for years, so
should have to be subject to changing they’re techniques for others benefit?
Also adding to that could be that maybe academics just don’t understand how it
would work on a whole. As I mentioned they have been used to doing something a
certain way for so long, that maybe it might not be as easy to change their
style. To be fair they aren’t going to benefit financially and, they don’t have
to do it people still do buy millions of book across the world still even, with
the internet available.
Also there are many ways to maintain copyright laws whilst
still being in the supervision of the Open Access. One example I found is this
“One easy, effective, and increasingly common way for copyright holders to
manifest their consent to OA is to use one of the Creative Commons licenses.
Many other open-content licenses will also work. Copyright holders could also
compose their own licenses or permission statements and attach them to their
works (though there are good reasons not to do so without legal advice).” This
is a great quotation I found from this website: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
this website also includes many other bullet points that are extremely relevant
and gives a good overview on, how Open Access would work if available. As
explain in the quotation copyrights might not be such a big deal as there are
many laws today, which essentially cover any concerns about copyright laws.
On a whole as I am a university student I am obviously going
to agree that Open Access would be a great thing as many people also studying
would agree. I find it very strange that something as good as this cannot be
simple constructed
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