Hacking & Open Source Culture Digital Poster Session

I attended one of the Open Access week events in the library for extra credit.  I was not really sure what to expect when I was going to this but when i walked into the library students were set up at tables in groups with their laptops set up with their digital posters that they were presenting to people as they went table to table.  These projects were all about open source culture and hacking.  All of the tables projects were different which was interesting to learn about different topics on open source.  Open access is having software that is free and available to all, meaning that anyone is able to access a program, and allowed to redistribute copies to people.

Many of the articles that we read in class when we first started talking about open source and open culture mentioned open science which "is a movement to make scientific research freely available".  With allowing for open science, people who are trying to research scientific things to help solve a problem or cure some sort of disease would be able to have research that was found readily available to them.  What I do not understand is why someone would want to implement closed science.  Information that is found and that has already been researched can be readily available and could help someone tremendously but then is locked and is not available to the public.  These documents need to
be made for researchers and people that are trying to access these files so that they can expand on the ideas presented in the research and are able to collaborate effectively.

If I was researching articles for a project and was looking for information that could help me defend my case and I came up on an article that seemed like it had all the information I needed but it was locked and I had to pay to access it I would not pay and would continue to look for another similar article that was free and open to the public.  

I found this groups presentation to be one of the more interesting ones because of the amount of researchers that their are that come across this problem.  I think that it is unfair for these documents to be closed and not available to researchers because of the benefit that these documents could be gaining from many different researchers that are collaborating to get the best information for their research.