Students for open access to research

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”.

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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.

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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.

There’s a ton of new resources available for students in the latest SPARC open access campaign. It’s called The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to scholarship. The brochure and Web site are packed with information about open access, designed to answer the questions a student might have.

I’ll be exploring the campaign all this week on Open Students. Visit the campaign site now, or read the announcement to learn more.

Welcome to Open Students, a new blog for students about open access to research.

I’m Gavin Baker, the community manager for Open Students. I graduated from the University of Florida in 2007, in political science. As a student, I was involved in a number of initiatives to support open access, which you can read about here. I’m pleased now to be launching Open Students as a platform to engage the student community, and as a forum to encourage dialogue.

Open Students is proudly sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about issues that affect students, covering the latest news, and introducing a great cast of contributors and guest bloggers from all walks of life. So check back often or subscribe to our RSS feed — and tell a friend!

We’re changing the way that research is disseminated. We are Open Students.