This week is the Open Access Week, I attended the Keynote event tonight and it was eye-opening. I learned that Open Access is “a movement to provide public access to scholarship such as peer reviewed journal articles and enable its reuse through alternative licensing”. It is a process of article archiving and publishing in open access journals.

The keynote speaker, professor Brian Nosek from University of Virginia talked about improving the openness and reproducibility of research through their organization.  I think they have very high and ideal goals and missions to achieve. However, I think it will be a great way to encourage scholars to improve openness and efficiency of their research.

I also watched the video “Everything is a Remix”, and I think it’s a great video, and I learned lots of history, music and movies, and also I learned about some famous singers and movie stars in the past. However, I can’t totally agree with the term “remix”, and I don’t really agree that everything is a remix. I remember one of the famous quotes said by Issac Newton is that “if I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants”, and I think that’s should be the real way of creating new knowledge or other intellectual works. We learn and summarize the knowledge and experiences from previous scholars and then we create new knowledge based on what we have known, it’s not just superficially remixing previous works. It should be original intellectual contribution. For instance, in the social science field, before we conduct research on any topic, we will do a comprehensive literature review first, so that we could build on the knowledge based on previous researchers, and I think this process must be true in other field of study as well.