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July 23, 2014 | By Maira Sutton Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online. A current situation in Colombia exemplifies this problem: a graduate student is facing four to eight years in prison for sharing an academic article on the Internet. He wasn't making a personal profit from sharing the article—he simply intended for other scientists like him to be able to access and cite this scientific research. Read my story (english), 26, is a Master's student who has been researching biodiversity and working on the conservation of reptiles and amphibians for several years in the South American region. Throughout his young career, the biggest obstacle he faced was in accessing academic resources that existed on global research databases. As a student at a small university in Armenia, the availability of research papers was so limited that he often had to save money to make trips to Bogotá to access biological collections, articles, and databases only available to him at natural history museums and libraries at the capital city. Read my story (english) My name is Diego Gomez and with 26 years old I have defined my great passion in life: the biodiversity conservation. Enjoying this passion, I have attained a BA in... View on www.karisma.org.co Preview by Yahoo Over time, he increasingly came to depend on the Internet. It enabled him to read relevant research, share documents, and communicate with others in his field. Despite the online resources that were available, there were still major barriers that prevented him from accessing the plethora of research that existed. So when he and others came across papers that were crucial to their work, they often shared it online for other researchers to access. Gomez says: Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an A... In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often u... View on www.eff.org Preview by Yahoo The important thing is to make a correct citation, attributing researchers’ work by indicating their name and year of publication and, of course, not claiming the work of another researcher, but to recognize it and value it. Therefore, what we usually do is to reference the findings and make them available to those who need them. One day a couple of years ago, he came across a paper that was especially useful to his field work. He then later shared the research online on the site, Scribd. The author of the paper then filed a lawsuit over the “violation of [his] economic and related rights.” Under the allegations of this lawsuit, Gomez could be sent to prison for up to eight years and face crippling monetary fines. read the whole story: Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online STEPHEN B. ALAYON Data Bank Senior Information Assistant Library and Data Banking Services Section Training and Information Division Aquaculture Department (AQD) Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) Tigbauan, Iloilo 5021 Philippines URL: http://www.seafdec.org.ph Telephone No.: 63 33 5119170 to 71 local 409 Fax No.: 63 33 5119174 Mobile Phone No.: 63 919 4506688 Email Add: [email protected], [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Filipino Librarians" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/filipinolibrarians. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
