Fair Use

Under the fair use rule, an author may use copyrighted material without paying royalties under certain conditions. These conditions include using an excerpt or quote from a work when writing a critique or review, new reporting, using a quote or passage for a scholarly arcticle or scientific work in order to clarify the author's point, photocopying portions of a work for nonprofit educational purposes, and parodies. The copyright act also specifies four factors used in determining whether or not a work is considered fair use:



1)the character of the use, for example, whether or not the work will be used for commercial or nonprofit use



2)the nature of the copyrighted work: published or unpublished, fiction or nonfiction, etc.



3)the amount and importance of a piece of copied work in relation to the whole work



4)the effect of the use on the market or value of the work

Open Access is the idea that research should be available to anyone via the Internet at no cost, immediately after publication. Many large-scale publishers object to this idea because the costs of subscriptions help to fund their companies. In addition, many commercial journal publishers argue that Open Access is government interference and a threat to peer review. Some even argue that there is no need for anyone outside of major academic institutions to have access to their research. This is highly inaccurate. Anyone interested in finding out more about a scientific issue can make good use of these articles.

The high cost of subscribing to these articles and the difficulty of obtaining them are both inconveniences that can be avoided with Open Access. Promoters of the idea include students (myself included), librarians, and universities. Open Access is capable of saving universities millions of dollars a year by granting access to those same journals online for free. Authors of the articles and journals are also benefitted by this principle. Making their work available to more readers will increase recognition and allow their works to make a bigger impact on the academic world.