It is a general consensus that students like us mostly support Open Access as it benefits our learning when doing online research. However, while reading some of my classmates’ blogs, there were refreshing approaches that I observed; Everyone can be a content producer – A musician, a Journalist, Researcher or even a Film Maker. With various specific examples given by Rebecca and Xin Lin, it helped me to better relate and understand the pros and cons of Open Access, and also challenge me to think deeper into this topic.
Rebecca gave an example of how Taylor Swift (An American singer-song writer), view Open Access music available for audiences.
This really got me thinking that content producers in the music industries view Open Access differently to scientific researchers and publishers.
In the music industry, music artists would hope that people value their work by buying their music albums. However, some may also argue that free access music help artists gain popularity and reputation. Relating to one of the disadvantages mentioned in topic 5: ‘Lack of quality control’, Open Access in these industries may also face the same issue and result to unethical behaviour such as illegal downloading of content such as music.
Here’s the impact of Open Access in the music industry:
By Dayna
Therefore, not all industries benefit from Open Access. This brings back to the intention of a content producer, which can be further explained through Xin Lin’s blog.
Xin Lin blog emphasized on how different content producers differ in terms of their source of motivation for job satisfaction in using Open Access models. Most of my classmates’ blog mentioned about the issue of sustainability due to absence of incentives in Open Access, which causes content producers to feel unmotivated and slowly switch to Subscription Access.
However, I feel that Xin Lin made a very good point on how content producers that use Open Access gain intrinsic satisfaction based on the Herzberg’s Two Factor Motivational theory.
This really gave me a deeper insight on how to challenge the view of ‘lesser incentives in Open Access compared to Paid Access that leads to issue of sustainability’. It gave me a better understanding of how every content producer have a specific purpose and intention of going Open Access.
With further research done, I found a research study to evaluate the intentions of authors publishing in Open Access Journals: which includes factors such as gaining reputation, career benefits and visibility.[1] As much as most content producers wish to gain monetary benefits, this article shows that these few factors significantly affect authors’ intention to publish in Open Access Journals.
In conclusion, I feel that there is no perfect type of Access – Be it ‘Open’ or ‘Paid’, since each has its own benefits and harms for different industries. It depends on the intention of the content producers in adopting both models respectively. Thus, I believe that every content producer, regardless of which industry, have the right to decide which model best helps them to meet their intention and purpose of producing these contents online.
[Word count: 330 words, excluding topic headers]
Review my comments on Renee’s and Xin Lin’s blog
References:
[1] Masrek, M.N. and Yaakub, M.S. (2015) ‘Intention to publish in open access journal: The case of multimedia university Malaysia ☆’, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, pp. 3420–3427.
Adkins, A. (2016) ‘How does illegally Downloading music impact the music industry?’, Small Business Chron, Available at:http://smallbusiness.chron.com/illegally-downloading-music-impact-music-industry-27748.html (Accessed 16 November )
Lepitak, S. (2016) 90% of online content to be held behind paywalls in three years media company survey suggests. Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/04/12/90-online-content-be-held-behind-paywalls-three-years-media-company-survey-suggests (Accessed: 15 November 2016).
Dayna. 