Breaking the Barrier to our Scholarly Heritage
How do you go about it?
It is my opinion that everyone should have access to knowledge. Especially those in our country. Tax payers in the United States, in my opinion, are entitled to the knowledge the scientific community produces from research considering that fact that the government provides these researchers with the grants necessary to create their projects. So why is it that the only people who have access to these articles are those who are able to attend universities who pay for the rights to these databases and those who can afford to pay the hefty sum for each individual article or membership subscription?
We all know how much Wikipedia has changed the lives of people around the world. I myself have learned a substantial amount just from reading different articles on Wikipedia. Things that I would never know about. It’s one of the most amazing things about this day-and-age. I barely remember the time before Wikipedia, but it has evolved into something very beautiful. Of course, there’s much more knowledge to be found out there, and that lies behind locked doors.
I think that Aaron Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto is an idea that I highly respect. I do not really know if it was very effective however considering the amount of change that has occurred since his ideas were released. There are angles that definitely need to be taken in terms of laws that should be passed. There’s a nonsensical process that goes on with how the research is produced and passed on to the publishers and then to databases. Basically, the people who produce and review these papers are not employed by the journals that put them together and sell them. If there is to be any change in terms of making this knowledge available to the general population, it means making it so the people who publish these papers online are restricted from receiving such substantial monetary gains from work they did not produce. I am not really clear on why this hasn’t happened yet, because it seems rather intuitive. But I definitely want to research more on this topic as we delve in deeper into the complicated nature that is the open access movement and the barriers that hold it back.
