Reflection on free software
Characters:
Theme: Free Software
Competencies
Mathematical competence in science, technology and engineering
Digital Competence
Subjects and year by Educational System
Spain > Digitisation > 4th ESO > Digitisation of the personal learning environment
Spain > Technology and digitisation > 3rd ESO > Digitisation of the personal learning environment
Enunciation
Read the following text and answer the questions:
Sci-Hub -created in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan, a software developer and neuroscientist from Kazakhstan– is a website that provides free access to millions of recent scientific articles from the world's leading scientific journals. As a result, she has been considered a "hacker" and has even been sued by scientific journals.
Do you think that scientific articles should be accessible to everyone?
Do you consider that the accessibility of scientific articles has important advantages for the progress of science? Why?
Sci-Hub is a good example of network communication, what other examples do you know?
Observations and context
Alexandra Elbakyan can be linked to other contemporary engineers or computer scientists, for example:
− Meredith Westafer, a senior industrial engineer at Tesla who leads the design and scale model of the company's Gigafactory.
− Tanya Lattner, President and COO of the LLVM Foundation (compilation project).
− Karen Casella, engineering lead at Netflix (in charge of making sure users view content securely).
− Caitlin Kalinowski, head of hardware at Oculus (the division in charge of Facebook's virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift).
− Aanchal Gupta, Director of Security at Facebook.
− Reshma Shetty, co-founder at Ginkgo Bioworks, a cutting-edge biotech company that designs synthetic DNA.
Description
Research question and reflection. Through a brief text on the Sci-Hub webite, created by Alexandra Elbakyan, it is intended to make students think about free software. Especially, about free access to scientific content.