With the introduction of the internet, the availability of reliable information within the scholarly community soared. Open access is a movement that advocates for free and open online access to academic information, without the need of payment. On an international scale, this brought forth learning opportunities for a lot more people across the world. Metadata is data that describes other data, by creating a reference that helps to sort and identify information being described. This data can be thought of as a short summary of the information it is describing. The information that it is describing can be data found within a webpage, document, or a file. The Creative Common License is a standardized method to grant public permission to use an artist’s piece of creative work. There are six different licenses that an artist can choose from that allows the general public to do specific things with those images (depending on the kind of licence it is associated with).
All three of these advancements act as a security blanket, protecting the intellectual and artistic property of those that release their work to the public.
One of the main articles used for these blog posts, is the article used in the previous blog post about bioluminescence in plants (very similar to those found in the movie Avatar). The article that was used is called “Plants with genetically encoded autoluminescence”, by Tatianna Mitiouchkina (& her group). This was found on the website called Nature Biotechnology, which is an open access website that complies with the funder and institutional requirements.
In my personal opinion, these open access sources are so important to the education and movement of information. It helps to break down the barrier that poverty creates, while also giving credit to those who own that intellectual property. Now to provide true open access for all individuals, we need to work on making internet a free commodity!
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 