During Open Access week, I stopped by the Fenwick Info desk. I was able to get some informational packets and forms on open access week. There were many packets and brochures describing the history of open access and how students and professors could become more involved in the open access movement. I found one packet to be very informative on how I could learn to use open access to my advantage when conducting research.
The idea of open access to scholarly journals seems to be a big debate and this article talks about how publishers make millions of dollars off of research and peer reviews that are done for free. It also talks about Aaron Swartz who led the movement for allowing access to journals by basically "stealing" them and sharing them.
Open access ( OA) is the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly research. It is most commonly applied to scholarly journal articles, but it is also increasingly being provided to theses, book chapters, and scholarly monographs.
You can download Wikipedia and only have it take up about 9 GB of space on your computer. It would definitely come in handy if you need to do research but don't have Internet access.
This article is from the perspective of a university instruction coordinator and details concerns about JSTOR and how it is limiting information to students.