#ioe12 Open Access

This week I looked at Open Access in the Openness in Education course. What I got from this section was that research should be free, unrestricted, and online. www.righttoresearch.org has made a strong case for this. This short video is excellent! http://vimeo.com/6973160




Research is conducted by faculty who give their articles to journals for free, they are peer-reviewed by other experts for free, and this work is able to be accomplished through tuition or tax dollars that students contribute to; only for them to be denied access to the information. How sad that a researcher could publish their knowledge and then not be able to share it with their students because the library couldn’t afford the journal? It makes no sense.

Peter Suber gave a great Open Access Overview.
Gratis OA = Free of charge
Libre OA = Free of charge and some of the restrictions
It should be immediate and apply to full  texts! What a concept. As a doctoral student I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be denied access to full text articles that would further my learning. Publicly funded research is a strong argument for open access. For example, if a faculty member at a state college publishes work they completed on the state’s payroll, why must the state then pay someone else for that information? Again it makes no sense. Open access journals and open access repositories seem like the most common sense solutions to this problem. Journals may not be free to produce, but the cost should not be a barrier to readers. OA Journals have peer-review and follow the same standards as journals that are not open, only students do not have to pay. Their are many other business models to sustain an open journal. Some the author or institution pays a fee for submission, others have subsidies, member groups etc. OA Repository often are at institutions, that do not perform peer review, but may host some that have been.

Heather Morrison blogged about the huge increase in OA in 2011. This is a good thing, but I think what we really need for open access to become the norm instead of the exception is a major paradigm shift. Tenure can not be based on being published in closed journals. Institutions need to make a commitment to open access by rewarding those who choose to publish that way. They need to take the lead by creating their own repositories or even their own journals. Pressure to publish in a top “prestigious” journal is so strong and often rewarded. This is what needs to change, otherwise faculty who want to publish in an open access journal may be choosing between their career and openness.