The Association for College and Research Libraries defines scholarly communication as “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.” Scholarly communication enables students, professors, and researchers to read, learn from, and share information. Recent technological advances have made it possible to instantly share and have access to an extremely wide range of information. According to Wolfram in “Understanding and Navigating the Scholarly Communication Landscape in the Twenty-First Century,” a relatively new movement called the Open Science Movement argues that research and scholarly papers should be free for all to use. This would increase the ease at which research is accessed, helping with future experiments. An ethical dilemma associated with this has to do with privacy and plagiarism, because when so many people have access to such a large quantity of information, a few are bound to plagiarize or misuse these articles.
I found this article interesting because I really have never taken the time to think about how easy it is to access information for research. There are downsides to the idea of Open Access, however I believe that the positives outweigh the negatives.
This article prompted me to wonder what scholars did before the times of online research databases? Google and the internet have really enhanced how people do research.