Students for open access to research

As you may have noticed, I’ve been having some trouble with categories on Open Students lately: namely, that they’ve disappeared. I’ve been trying to resolve this but have been unsuccessful so far. I hope to have the issue straightened out soon.

Also, I’ve upgraded WordPress, the software that runs Open Students, to the latest release candidate. As with any software upgrade, and especially with pre-stable versions, there may be some issues; if you notice anything amiss, please let me know in the comments or via email.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Sigi Jöttkandt. Dr. Jöttkandt is a researcher in the theory department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands where she co-edits S, the open access journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. She is also a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press, a new open access publishing collective in critical theory launching this spring.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I was really excited to discover Open Students and to see how student activists are taking up the cause of OA. This is a very heartening sign because it means there’s real potential now for long-lasting and deep-seated changes to take place in academic publishing and scholarly communication more generally.

I asked Gavin if I could do this guest blog, however, because I’m a little worried that students in the humanities might feel a bit left out from the OA debate, which has been largely dominated up till now by the sciences. I want to emphasize how OA has enormous implications for us, too, in that it currently represents the simplest and most obvious solution to the crisis in monograph publishing that is causing an insidious contraction in our fields, and is hitting younger academics particularly hard.

The real question is why humanities academics are not taking to the opportunities represented by OA in the same way as academics in the sciences. From speaking with colleagues, my sense is that free online publishing continues to have some way to go before it is fully accepted by our peers as a credible, let alone a desirable and prestigious, medium for one’s work. There’s still a lot of FUD among us: fear, uncertainty and doubt about the changes represented by new technologies, including whether online publications will count towards job offers or tenure, or even if OA journals will still be around and available on the web after a few years. These are important issues and they need to be seriously addressed before OA - both “Gold” (publishing in OA journals) and “Green” (archiving in OA repositories, which confronts its own set of issues in the humanities) - can really be adopted by the mainstream.

This is why Gary Hall, David Ottina, Paul Ashton and I - OA advocates and journal editors - founded Open Humanities Press (OHP) last year. This open access publishing initiative is intended to offer humanities academics assurances that the OA journals affiliated with OHP meet the strictest standards of academic publishing, scholarship and archiving. These issues are typically overseen by a publishing house and this is also the role OHP is intended to play: OHP journals are not only all peer-reviewed, they also go through a rigorous external certification process by OHP’s independent editorial board whose policies are clearly laid out and available on the OHP website.

The other idea behind forming OHP was that it would enable us to pool our individual resources. As a publishing collective, we can provide each other with technical help, coordinate a permanent archiving strategy for our journals, and share graphic design skills in an effort to bring all the journals - and eventually we hope, also OA monographs - up to the visual and technical standards humanities academics expect of prestigious professional publications. We believe this will have a positive impact on how OA journals are perceived by our communities. We’re hopeful it will also help build greater trust in free, peer-reviewed online scholarship in all disciplines by showing that there is nothing inherent about the digital medium that means publications cannot be peer-reviewed and have the high editorial standards of comparable print publications.

Currently lots of exciting independent initiatives are springing up in and around the digital humanities and its implications for rethinking scholarship and the university (e.g. Media Commons, Voice of the Shuttle, NINES, The Digital Arts and Humanities of the UK Arts and Humanities Council, alt.x, The Imaginary Border Academy, The EduFactory, The Experimental University, along with the new discursive networks proposed by the Institute for Critical Climate Change to name just a few). Part of what we’re hoping OHP will do is enable these groups to find one another and lend different voices to the OA debate with the unique perspectives that come from the specific questions and theoretical approaches of humanities disciplines.

Open Students is a clear demonstration that students already “get” the way OA enables us to do more rigorous research when we have access to all the relevant materials, not just those which our library and interlibrary loan budgets can afford to purchase. What’s been interesting to discover is that some of the strongest OA advocates in the humanities are leading senior figures like J. Hillis Miller, Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt (all of whom are generously sharing their expertise on OHP’s advisory board). It suggests that what we really need now is to make overtures towards mid-career academics, many of whom have yet to fully understand what Open Access means. As OA journal editors, we are working to raise awareness and trust in OA publishing among these scholars but we would also love to hear ideas from students about how we can work together. As with many of the cultural shifts in recent history, it is students who are on the front-lines of this transformative change too.

OHP will be launching in Spring 2008 with 7 of the leading OA journals in critical and cultural theory. Gary Hall and I will be speaking at HumaniTech at UC Irvine, and at UC Santa Barbara in early April about the project. We’d love to see some of you there. But of course if you can’t make it, we would be very interested to hear your ideas, strategies, comments, suggestions, etc. either here or by contacting us at info [at] openhumanitiespress.org

A recent interview with Bora Zivkovic has an important reminder for every student. (Zivkovic is the author of A Blog Around the Clock, a science blog, and Online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE.)

The reminder is: Your library card expires when you graduate.

Back in grad school I was a fanatical downloader and reader of scientific papers. I read papers old and new in my field, in several related fields, and in some unrelated but interesting fields. I read, carefully, several papers per day. Then, a few months after I left grad school and started science blogging, my password expired for the school library and suddenly I realized what I never thought of before — papers are actually NOT free and available for everyone to read. And I needed my daily dose of papers, both for blogging and for my, at the time, illusion of writing a Dissertation. I had to resort to begging friends for PDFs.

If you think that everyone should have access to the scientific literature, even if they’re not students, then you should support open access. Because one day, you won’t be a student either…

Carolyn Kenny is a professor of human development and indigenous studies at Antioch University and co-editor-in-chief of the open access journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. In a new interview at Create Change, Kenny describes how she got her beginning with open access:

I was a recalcitrant, traditional paper-and-pen professor, who printed out every document from the computer and worked with the hard copies. About ten years ago, one of my art students said she wanted to do a Web-based thesis. I was horrified. I said: “No way. This is ridiculous.” But she was persistent. Finally, I told her to give it a try. Once I got into it, I was totally hooked. She was able to embed photographs of the art installations of her students in the document. When she cited books and articles, we could just click onto an embedded link that took us directly to the reference list for the full citations. I was just blown away. Ever since then, I’ve been a fan. Now I encourage students to do Web-based dissertations. I’m not fluent in electronic media myself. Often I learn about new options from our librarian or my students.

Students: Ask your professors to support open access!

Creative Commons, whose copyright licenses are used by the Public Library of Science and other open access journals, is seeking interns for summer 2008. Positions are available in community development, business development, technology, and development. Applications are due on March 21, so apply soon!

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development is a new, open access journal led by students at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and author of the 2005 bestseller The End of Poverty, helped launch the journal this week.

From the inaugural issue’s Note from Editors:

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development began as an idea: an idea that a group of ten students genuinely and passionately believed had the potential to make this world a better place. …

Widespread global poverty, hunger, environmental damage, and conflict are only some of the problems facing humanity today. As a bold collective of students intolerant of inertia, we push you to understand the urgency of forging solutions to these problems. …

The concept of consilience, “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding,” runs through each article. With this in mind, we urge you to be active readers, to not only think deeply about each specific article but also to consider the interaction between the individual pieces.

We urge you to contrast theory against practice, one discipline against another, and your ideas against the authors’ ideas. The Editorial Board of Consilience has high hopes that this exchange of ideas, sparked by the written and visual media contained in this online space, will contribute to the progress of sustainable development.

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Professor Jos van Helvoort. Professor van Helvoort is a senior lecturer in Library & Information Studies at The Hague University. Professor van Helvoort has previously conducted research on benefits of open access for students in higher education (see also this video).

Opinions are solely those of the author.

Higher education in the Netherlands (and in particular the education at universities for applied science) has oriented in recent years extremely on competence based education. In this educational system students not only learn from the instruction by a teacher or professor but also by exploring a problem or a theme in its professional environment. The didactics are, in other words, based on “learning by doing”. While working on the assignment students are of course coached by a ‘tutor’ and can ask an expert for help, but they obtain a lot of the knowledge and understanding while working on the task themselves. The tasks they work on are based on real life professional situations and sometimes are indeed real life projects. Examination of learning outcomes in competence based education is mostly done by evaluating the student’s performance while working on the task, and so it is often referred to as “alternative” or “authentic assessment”.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our first guest blogger, Dr. Stevan Harnad. Dr. Harnad is Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Sciences at Université du Québec à Montréal and Professor in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton. Dr. Harnad has been a prominent thinker in the open access movement for more than 10 years, including his “subversive proposal,” which predicted open access and self-archiving at a time few scholars were using the Web.

Dr. Harnad has cross-posted this entry at his blog, Open Access Archivangelism. Opinions are solely those of the author.

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SUMMARY: Open Access (OA) will not come until universities, the research-providers, make it part of their mandate not only to publish their research findings, as now, but also to see to it that the few extra keystrokes it takes to make those published findings OA — by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories, free for all online — are done too. Students are in a position to help convince their universities to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, at long last.

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My guess is that Open Access (OA) already sounds old hat to the current generation of students, and that you are puzzled more about why we are still talking about OA happening in the future, rather than in the distant past (as the 80’s and 90’s must appear to you!).

Well, you’re right to be both puzzled and impatient, but let me try to explain why it’s been taking so long. (I say “try” because I have to admit that I too am still somewhat perplexed by the slowness of OA growth, even after sampling the sluggishness of its pace for nearly 2 decades now!) And then I’ll try to suggest what you students can do to help speed OA on its way to its obvious, optimal, and long overdue destination.

Click here to read the rest of the entry…

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Update: Everything should be working again. Please report any problems in the comments or via email to gavin@openstudents.org.

Library Journal Academic Newswire has interviewed yours truly, Open Students‘ humble community manager, about the new SPARC student outreach campaign. You can read the interview here.

How do you approach the subject of open access with students? Is there any real knowledge base there to work from?
Issues like open access are certainly niche issues for students, who are more accustomed to hearing about issues like the Iraq war, the environment, and the like when someone talks to them about political and social issues. But when I’ve talked with students who have no prior knowledge of open access, they grasp it pretty quickly. Everybody’s had the experience of finding a paper that looks relevant to their work, then discovering their library doesn’t have a subscription. Graduate students especially are cognizant of the academic publishing system and understand how the subscription-only model works against the research community. And, of course, most students today have grown up online. My generation expects access to information, and systems that don’t provide this seem foreign to us. Students are fertile soil for supporting open access. It just takes someone to plant the seed.