Expertise in an Era of Open Education and Crowd-Sourced Knowledge

Society: Expertise in an Era of Open Education and Crowd-Sourced Knowledge
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Society: Expertise in an Era of Open Education and Crowd-Sourced Knowledge
The Cambridge mathematician, Timothy Gowers expresses his widespread concerns that some members of the academic have against the leading player in the industry of academic publishing, Elsevier. The mathematician’s massive boycott of Elsevier, which has seen immense support from over 6000 scholars and discussions over the paywall of information published by the company (WNYC, 2012). Around the world, there has been a rising discontent with the cost of articles written by academicians and the general model adopted by the publishing company. Gowers argues that taxpayers funded research results must be made freely available to the public and Elsevier should not charge the public for accessing research information, as this would make expertise meaningless when knowledge is crowd-sourced.
The argument that Timothy Gowers makes substantial logic because the quality of information the public accesses is critical compared to random searches on the Internet. According to Lovink (2011), the rise of search engines has made it impossible to determine the legitimacy of information. Search engines such as Google will rank articles in terms of popularity and not authenticity (Lovink, 2011). While the...