An interesting learning experience

First of all, before this week's blog starts, I'd like to say how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to meet and chat with David Wiley. Thank you, Dr. Curry. One of my problems is that when I get excited, my mind goes blank. I was very excited after meeting David that day, so it made me ask a question that was obviously incoherent. Even so, David was very patient in answering my questions. Thank you very much! David.

For me, this ZOOM meeting is a one-and-a-half-hour knowledge feast. I learned a lot while listening to David answer each student's questions. In today's blog, I want to talk about a few points that I find interesting.

First, I do like to talk about my question and David's answer. Before the conference, I had always believed that the researchers' research results belonged to the researchers themselves. Even now, I think I am right. However, I missed a point. Researchers can choose investors. They can choose not only public funding but they can choose private funding. David woke me up here. The researchers choose public funding, which means that they agree to share their research results because they are aware of the regulation that publicly funded resources should be openly licensed. Choosing public funding even though they knew the rules meant they agreed to share their findings. Otherwise, they can choose private investment as David was talking about.

The second one I want to talk about is the future of OER. What is the future of OER? Will all resources be open? David gave us the answer. I remember David mentioned that there are some resources that cannot be open like nuclear research, safety information, and so on. For this reason, I think the future of OER may be to open up all the resources that can be opened up and keep some of the secrets resources that cannot be opened up. This may be the best future for OER. However, I have a question here. If the future of OER is the coexistence of open and hidden resources, then who is to judge whether resources need to be open or hidden? I know that some resources that are obviously needed to be hidden (i.e., nuclear research, safety information, etc.), but what about resources that are obscure? Who can be the judge?

Finally, I want to talk about Sci-Hub, which I am very happy we talk about it at the meeting. I think it is like a website I used to download free movies in China when I was a kid and did not know about copyright law. Yeah, now I know it is illegal and I will not encourage anyone around me to do it. However, I think David is right on one point. Sci-hub maybe is a good backup plan. When we are stuck in some imperfect network system like failing to log in to our account or system error, we can choose to search for some resources on Sci-Hub. Why not? It can help us save time. You should know that time is life. I do not want to waste my life on some crappy web system. However, we still need to remember that Sci-Hub is only a backup plan, and we still need to find legitimate resources in the first place.