Scientific Research and Freedom

Department of Biomaterials Science, Baylor College of Dentistry, Texas A&M Health Science Center, 3302 Gaston Ave., Dallas, USA

Corresponding Author:

Elshahawy WM
Department of Biomaterials Science
Baylor College of Dentistry
Texas A&M Health Science Center
3302 Gaston Ave., Dallas, USA
E-mail: welshahawy@bcd.tamhsc.edu

Received date: August 22, 2011; Accepted date: August 25, 2011; Published date: August 27, 2011

Citation: Elshahawy WM (2011) Scientific Research and Freedom. J Biotechnol Biomaterial 1:106e. doi:10.4172/2155-952X.1000106e

Copyright: © 2011 Elshahawy WM. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Abstract

Nowadays, the need for scientific research is much more important than any other time. Scientific research will allow the community to grasp the flowery knowledge that provides comfort to man and help him to get over some of his problems. Scientific research needs freedom. The relation between both is built upon how they affect each other As the freedom of man is public rights, the academic freedom is needed for the academic society. The academic freedom is embodied in freedom of thinking and unchain of information sources. The effect of scientific research on man’s life comes from the applying benefits of these researches. Therefore, there must be a way for researches to spread out and overcome any political and geographical borders. Freedom of the scientific research tends to be associated providing scientists with access to and participation in the exchange of information and opinions. Right now, most scientific research exists behind expensive paywalls. Open-access journals are different. They make all the papers they publish available to anyone online. Thus, the dissemination is maximized for all to read and use for free. For the user for information, it will make it possible to easily find information without having to incur the costs of numerous subscriptions; for science libraries, it will reduce the astonishing fees they have to pay in order to provide coverage for their users.

Nowadays, the need for scientific research is much more important than any other time. Scientific research will allow the community to grasp the flowery knowledge that provides comfort to man and help him to get over some of his problems. Scientific research needs freedom. The relation between both is built upon how they affect each other

As the freedom of man is public rights, the academic freedom is needed for the academic society. The academic freedom is embodied in freedom of thinking and unchain of information sources. The effect of scientific research on man’s life comes from the applying benefits of these researches. Therefore, there must be a way for researches to spread out and overcome any political and geographical borders.

Freedom of the scientific research tends to be associated providing scientists with access to and participation in the exchange of information and opinions. Right now, most scientific research exists behind expensive paywalls. Open-access journals are different. They make all the papers they publish available to anyone online. Thus, the dissemination is maximized for all to read and use for free. For the user for information, it will make it possible to easily find information without having to incur the costs of numerous subscriptions; for science libraries, it will reduce the astonishing fees they have to pay in order to provide coverage for their users.

There are some challenges to open access, including how journals achieve substainability, how quality control can be assured, how author rights are to be protected. With regard to substainability, all published papers will be achieved in central repositories. Quality control arises from the pressure of competition. With regard to the protection of rights, I should note that copyright protects the journal, not the author; the author has given rights to his or her paper to the journal. The author at time has to ask permission of the journal to use that very same work.

A substantial member of open access journals is journal of Biotechnology and Biomaterials published by OMICS publishing group. All published articles by OMICS are deposited in different repositories such as DOAJ, EBSCO, Index Copernicus, ScientificCommons and partially in PubMed. OMICS publishing group allows scientists to share their views on researches in various social networking sites like Face book, Twitter, Linked in, RSS Feeds etc. These features aim to build a bridge of knowledge between scientists all over the world.