As stated on Open Access Explained, open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles with full re-use articles. This debate of open access falls into the areas of music, entertainment, media production, art, photos, and much of the content online. This video, as well as one particular presentation during this event, focused specifically on Open Science. Open Science, as defined in the students' presentation, is a movement to make scientific research freely available.
Prior to this class, the idea of scientists and publishers charging money for access to their work seemed rational to me. Years of dedication, time, and money deserve some profitability and they should be able to do as they wish with their work. At the same time though, I found myself very unwillingly to pay any money to subscribe to a research article and would simply move on to another article that provided similar information. This reaction of mine was probably very similar to that of other average internet browsers and scholars on tight budgets. On the other hand, scientists and professionals who are looking to expand on their on research may find this system irritating, just like the speaker of Open Access Explained did.
"It's so irrational to think that these scientists like [him] are paid by taxpayers to do research and to discover things and distribute that, and then two years of work by twenty people is going to be compressed into a paper and not made available."
Some may see Open Access as a violation to one's work and as a missed opportunity to profit, but that's not what science is about. For people to grow on a scientific concept and expand on research, they need other research. Scientific discoveries should be collaborative: people's mistakes lead to others using their own knowledge to tweak, and so on until they arrive at extraordinary findings in the long-run. A very big part of the potential audience of a scientific journal is deterred due to the fees, so publishers might as well make this knowledge open to promote collaboration and the building upon science.
"Science spreads when there's no restrictions, and openness accelerates that."
As previously mentioned, this topic of Openness is applicable to many areas. Another poster I found very interesting was about the Youtube to MP3 converter resource. This group of students focused on the liability of these functions; if a certain song was converted and did not have open access, is Youtube or the converter liable? If it's on Youtube, should it be automatically open to anyone? In a way, the converter is taking an available file and simply changing the type of file. Sites as big as Youtube protect themselves with their Terms & Conditions Agreement when users upload their videos, but converter sites are evidently not as protected, so they are currently suffering from legal issues. I have personally used these type of sites myself and believe that if it's free to view on Youtube it should not be problematic to change the file type. I'm intrigued as to where this particular debate goes and believe that these types of issues will be inevitable if the idea of Open Access is not accepted.Overall, attending this Poster Session was a very interesting experience. I had never personally seen online posters, especially as a poster session event. From what I saw, they are a mix of PowerPoint slides and paper posters in that they're very simple and visually appealing, and can range from one to multiple slides. Collaboration was essential at this event because a lot of research went into every presentation and group members took turns in speaking about their areas of expertise to build on others' topics when presenting.
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