Last week's Do Now asked students to consider whether knowledge on the Internet should be open to everyone or protected by copyright law? This was based on the work by Aaron Swartz whose Internet activism was all about open and unlimited access to knowledge and the wealth of material available on the Internet. He built technology for the open licensing project Creative Commons and sought access to academic and research work which he felt should be freely available to further learning for the greater good.
The arguments about open access in relation to academia are these: JSORT articles are scholarly funded through research grants to academics for the purpose of advancing learning for all. As government funded assets, they should be publicly available. But does this argument apply to other types of information and data? Below are student responses.
