After reading an article written by Malcolm Gladwell in
The New Yorker titled
Priced To Sell, there was a great question lingering in my head, should all information be free? Of course, I'm not talking about information pertaining to topics that can be harmful to the public, although I am talking about academic information as well as newspapers and magazines. To be honest, I believe that information of that type should be paid for, to an extent. Perhaps having a website that you pay a monthly fee to, which grants the reader unlimited access to any material the site has on file. With a payment like this each entity receives some cash flow. Although this may not be the most effective way for those individuals and/or publishing companies, it is some money coming back to them.
I do see this system helping me in my pursuit of a degree in Wildlife Management as well as in my chosen career field as a Wildlife Biologist. For example, over the summer of 2012, I worked for Nebraska Game and Parks Commission as a seasonal employee. During that summer there was an massive outbreak of EHD (Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease) in the states population of White-tailed Deer. Being my first experience with this virus, I did not know whether it could be transmitted to humans as well as any other domesticated animal. I tried to do some research on this virus, but was unsuccessful in finding the answers to all of my questions. If I had access to a scholarly source of information, I would have learned that humans were safe from the virus, however some breeds of beef cattle were susceptible to it.
With the way these types of information are held at this point, only students and professors at universities can access databases that can find and sort information on almost any topic. This is a huge disadvantage to individuals who are not part of the university system including alumni. The power of such knowledge should be available to anyone that seeks it, or at least is affordable for the average person.
