Open Access

Open Access is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
Recently, it has been discussed as to whether all information located on the World Wide Web should be free or not. There are both good and bad points to this. As an aspiring journalist, it would be extremely helpful if I were to get all information off of the internet for free. For example, The Times UK newspaper has an online website- http://www.thetimes.co.uk. However, The Times offer a weekly subscription to its readers, which allows the user to access all internet pages on their website. The good thing about having this online means that it initially becomes a lot harder in order to obtain information that is copyrighted.

This picture shows The Times' 'half price sale' that offers a 3 month trial for just £2 per week. 

Some people believe that having open access on everything online would mean that pupils in school would not be learning to their full potential, as they would be finding everything online. Others believe that taking someone else's work and information is stealing. This is a lot like online piracy when it comes to music and movies. Seeing as people are illegally downloading them without paying, surely it is theft? 
However, there are also other people that argue that it is not stealing at all. Lawrence Lessig, an American academic, is well known for trying to reduce the legal restrictions that are currently on piracy, copyright and trademark. Lessig believes that if people are not removing the original, they are not stealing. When people copyright their work, why can users not simply copy and paste? They are not removing any information, simply using it. However, it is highly criticised as people believe that we should pay in order to acknowledge those who make/write it.

Even so, open access is not available all over the internet and it is illegal to take something that is copyrighted. However, I don't believe that the world of piracy will disappear any time soon.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access