The issue of intellectual property/copyright and providing free/open access to cultural/intellectual resources in today's digitally rich environment seems to be following me around for the past month or so. From work settings to casual lunch conversations, everyone seems to have an opinion on this subject. Most of the individuals I have discussed this topic with have formed well-constructed and insightful opinions, but few have done so objectively.
Educators tend to lean towards
open access for the sake of their students and academia, but can easily change
their stance when they become owners of intellectual property. Creators of content tend to favor copyright
enforcement, but I assume they would momentarily drop this stance for the time
needed to access that bit of information that isn’t coming their way gratis. My point is that everyone has their own
agenda, and that agenda needs to be guided by laws or freedoms that best suit
those agendas, but what about the agenda of the other half? This may sound a lot like politics, but at
least in politics we believe that our views are beneficial for the greater
good. Intellectual property and open
access are very different. No one
believes that intellectual property will benefit everyone any more than anyone
believes open access will benefit everyone.
I probably shouldn’t categorize
all educators and content creators into one pool. There are some individuals who have their
footing in both areas and have made choices that have adverse effects. One such individual is Thomas Krichel, a former
professor of mine from my time at LIU.
Professor Krichel is best known for creating the RePEc digital library
for economics in the 1990s “which as of today holds over 362,000 items of
interest, 261,000 of which are available online (Morrison, 2006).” As a content creator, Professor Krichel has
written and co-written many working papers which are open-accessible. Krichel has decided to forgo any monetary
and/or professional benefits of being published for the betterment of open information
sharing.
I am by no means attempting to
glorify Professor Krichel. I simply mean
to indicate an over-lapping area in this debate, of which there are quite a few. The readings from this module have made me
more aware of this. It is these very
overlapping areas in which we should attempt to work collectively.
Morrison, Heather. (2006,
February 13). Thomas Krichel: a man with ideas, and drive! Retrieved from http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/2006/02/thomas-krichel-man-with-ideas-and.html
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