IS428 2016-17 Term1 Assign2 Wu Wei
Theme of Interest
Have you ever heard of the term "Open Access"[1]? If you have never heard about it, I guess you have never tried to get access to those scholarly articles or professional reports online. It is a painful experience when you finally find a research paper relates to your group project on Google Scholar but which requires a purchase to access. Personally, I have such experiences occasionally in many of my school project researches. This is a reason why I am a strong supporter of Open Access Movement[2]. Open Access Movement is the worldwide effort to provide free access to scientific and scholarly researches. In 2013, the US government "issued United States' Federal Agencies with more than $100 million in annual R&D expenditures to develop plans within six months to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication" [3]. Other countries like China, Russia, Japan, India and etc, all trying to achieve open access for individuals. Thus, my question comes out: How is the progress of Open Access Movement? Are we getting fruitful results? Or are we currently in a bottleneck phase indeed?
Find Appropriate Data
The data set of 101-innovations-research-tools-survey includes all survey responses from 20663 researchers all over the world. The data size is too huge which also contains irrelevant information regarding our questions. Thus, to narrow down the scope, I need to further break our questions to specific parts:
- What kinds of tools/sites are researchers using when they want to search relative content?
- Are they able to get free access to these tools/sites?
- Are people from all countries using the same tools/site?
- Could there be a relationship between research role and tools/sites of using?
- Do researchers support the idea of open access?
- Could there be a relationship between the researcher's nationality and support of open access?
After I have these breakdowns, I am able to select specific data accordingly.
