Tuesday 8 January 2013

Greedy Authors Deny The World



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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