Democratic School

The democratic school concerns itself with the concept of access to knowledge. As opposed to focusing on the accessibility of research and its understandability, advocates of this school focus on the access of products of research to the public. The central concern of the school is with the legal and other obstacles that hinder the access of research publications and scientific data to the public. The authors argue that proponents of this school assert that any research product should be freely available. The authors argue that the underlying notion of this school is that everyone has the same, equal right of access to knowledge, especially in the instances of state-funded experiments and data. The authors categorize two central currents that characterize this school: Open Access and Open Data.

* Open Data: The authors discuss existing attitudes in the field that rebel against the notion that publishing journals should claim copyright over experimental data, which prevents the re-use of data and therefore lowers the overall efficiency of science in general. The claim is that journals have no use of the experimental data and that allowing other researchers to utilize this data will be fruitful. The authors cite other literature streams that discovered that only a quarter of researchers agree to share their data with other researchers because of the effort required for compliance. * Open Access to Research Publication: According to this school, there is a gap between the creation and sharing of knowledge. Proponents argue, as the authors describe, that even scientific knowledge doubles every 5 years, access to this knowledge remains limited. These proponents consider access to knowledge as a necessity for human development, especially in the economic sense.