15.1 Open access journal literature is an open educational resource  (Page 10/16)

Graham, in response to Stevan’s comments, I agree with his statement but not with the stated reason:

If an article is licensed under a free license, e.g. the Creative Commons license as used by PLoS, BMC, et al., then it makes little practical difference whether the journal or the author holds the copyright. Either way, the article is free, irrevocably.

Getting the article online is not the only useful action one can make with the article copyright. Permission barriers, not just access barriers, are important. I discuss this at some length in a recent post on my blog ; Peter Suber’s comments on that post are a good companion.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Stevan. To have seen this coming for over 10 years, and see how far we still are from the goal, even though the infrastructure is there and it takes so little of a researcher’s time, must be terrifically frustrating. But, in my most humble opinion, he has a habit of confusing priority with importance. He seems to routinely dismiss any other goals or implementations of open access, saying in effect, “That’s not important; just archive already!” And he’s right: self-archiving should be the priority. But that doesn’t mean the other goals aren’t important.

Frankly, I would find open access boring if it were only about getting scholarship online for other scholars to find. There’s so much more we can do with it, and there’s no good reason not to.

8 ken udas- september 7th, 2007 at 7:06 am

Hello, Gavin, thank you for the thorough response to my question. You know, I have had a few interesting conversations lately and you struck on one of the themes – sustainability, which is frequently couched in terms of a business model. You provided what I think could be the start of a useful taxonomy that could grow significantly. I think that part of this is about motivation. We can take this in all sorts of ways, but I am thinking a bit about some dialog that followed from Wayne Mackintosh’s post last April when Richard Wyles wrote a bit about OER and some demand and supply issues that related to motivations, In part of one of his comments he included the following quote:

Part of the problem I see is that the cost of course materials is, more often than not, borne by the student in the form of text-books or course fees when digital library resources come into play.

Pointing out that there is little motivation on the part of faculty to assign AO/Fee Free resources to support their classes. This might relate to two other conversations that I have had this week. One was with a colleague here at Penn State, who is a local leader in OER. We were talking a bit about your (this) post and he raised an issue of conflict. Although his department sees no problem with OA journals per se, there are no OA journals in his discipline area with a high enough selectivity index to be seen as valuable within the tenure and promotion review process. You could imagine too that a graduate student who is interested in an academic career would consider this factor as she considers how search and selection committees review curriculum vita. I guess that the connection that I am trying to make is that if universities tend to bias faculty and students to publish in highly prestigious journals, and a majority of those journals are not OA will they (faculty) be predisposed to think of quality in these terms also and assign course materials from closed publications?