Open Access Scholarly Publications as OER

This paper presents the rationale, common practices, challenges, and some personal anecdotes from a journal editor on the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed scholarly articles as open educational resources (OER). The scholarly and professional discourse related to open educational resources has largely focused on open learning objects, courseware, and textbooks. However, especially in graduate education, articles published in scholarly journals are often a major component of the course content in formal education. In addition, open access journal articles are critical to expanding access to knowledge by scholars in the developing world and in fostering citizen science, by which everyone has access to the latest academic information and research results. In this article, I highlight some of the challenges, economic models, and evidence for quality of open access journal content and look at new affordances provided by the Net for enhanced functionality, access, and distribution. In the 17 years since I graduated with a doctorate degree, the climate and acceptance of open access publishing has almost reversed itself. I recall a conversation with my PhD supervisor in which he argued that publishing online was not a viable option as the product would not have permanency, scholarly recognition, or the prestige of a paper publication. His comments reflect the confusion between online resources and those described as open access, but as well illustrate the change in academic acceptance and use of open access products during the past decade. The evolution from paper to online production and consumption is a disruptive technology in which much lower cost and increased accessibility of online work opens the product to a completely new group of potential users. In the case of OER these consumers are primarily students, but certainly access to scholars from all parts of the globe and the availability to support citizen science (Silvertown, 2009) should not be underestimated.


Article abstract
This article presents the rationale, common practices, challenges, and some personal anecdotes from a journal editor on the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles as open educational resources (OER). The scholarly and professional discourse related to open educational resources has largely focused on open learning objects, courseware, and textbooks. However, especially in graduate education, articles published in scholarly journals are often a major component of the course content in formal education. In addition, open access journal articles are critical to expanding access to knowledge by scholars in the developing world and in fostering citizen science, by which everyone has access to the latest academic information and research results. In this article, I highlight some of the challenges, economic models, and evidence for quality of open access journal content and look at new affordances provided by the Net for enhanced functionality, access, and distribution. In the seventeen years since I graduated with a doctorate degree, the climate and acceptance of open access publishing has almost reversed itself. I recall a conversation with my PhD supervisor in which he argued that publishing online was not a viable option as the product would not have permanency, scholarly recognition, or the prestige of a paper publication. His comments reflect the confusion between online resources and those described as open access, but as well illustrate the change in academic acceptance and use of open access products during the past decade. The evolution from paper to online production and consumption is a disruptive technology in which much lower cost and increased accessibility of online work opens the product to a completely new group of potential users. In the case of OER these consumers are primarily students, but certainly access to scholars from all parts of the globe and the availability to support citizen science (Silvertown, 2009) should not be underestimated.

What is Open Access Scholarly Publication?
Open access (OA) scholarly works usually assume the same formal definitions as other open access works. The most common definition is that agreed to in 2001  This confusion between ready access and legal use results in a serious challenge to educational and research efficacy. This is underlined in a 2008 study of American K12 teachers that concluded The major finding of the study was that the key goals of teaching media literacy were "comprised by unnecessary copyright restrictions and lack of understanding about copyright law" (p. 1). Because of participants' lack of knowledge and understanding about the law's protections, their ability to share, teach, and have students produce media-rich texts was severely circumscribed. Not only that, but the researchers found that teachers' lack of knowledge was passed on to students as well as colleagues, perpetuating "copyright folklore" that often characterized the law as much more restrictive than it is. (Rife, 2008)  CC ND : Some authors and publishers use an additional restriction that stipulates no derivatives such as edits and additions.

CC NC :
The copyright owner can also include a noncommercial restriction that prohibits others from selling or bartering the copyright product.
CC SA : This share alike restriction allows the user to share the copyright material, if it is relicensed under the same licensing agreement adopted by the copyright owner.
All of these rights retained can be added together to create a legal license (linked to at http://creativecommons.org/) that has many combinations, for example CC BY-ND-NC.

In my work as editor of The International Review of Research in Open and Distance
Learning (http://www.irrodl.org), we initially adopted a CC BY-ND license as we felt that the tradition associated with scholarly publication was to quote sections (with attribution) rather than add to or make derivative products. However, the widely respected Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) required use of the CC BY to win its "OA gold seal". Upon reflection we considered that removing restrictions likely was in the interests of both our readers and our authors and thus changed our licensing requirements to attain the gold OA seal.

Gold and Green Standards of Open Access
A long time open access evangelist, Stephen Harnad, argues that there are two roads to OA: the "golden" road or standard (publish an article in an OA journal) and the "green" road (publish your article in a non-OA journal but also self-archive it for access by all in an OA or institutional archive, such as those listed at http://www.opendoar.org/). He contends that 90% of journals allow self-archiving and thus are in effect "open access"however data from the more definitive RoMEO database from the University of Nottingham refutes that claim ( Figure 1) and shows that in May 2013, of 1,245 publishers publishing over 18,000 journals, only 69% allow some form of self-archiving. The RoMEO Project with a mandate to help create an "environment in which Open Access will become the norm for distributing research" proposes and endorses an Open Access Scholarly Publications as OER Anderson Vol 14 | No 2 June/13 85 "Immediate Deposit, Open Access policy" by which institutes that employ scholars require an archive copy of any publication be stored in a content repository, immediately upon publisher acceptance. They argue that "This IDOA policy is greatly preferable to, and far more effective than a policy that allows delayed deposit (embargo) or opt-out as determined by publisher policy or copyright restrictions"

Rationale for OA
The growing interest by scholars, librarians, funders, and foundations in OA is motivated by a variety of sometimes divergent interests. I briefly overview these motivations in the following section.

Citizen science.
Citizen science is perhaps as old as human knowledge itself and consists of ordinary people working alone or together to resolve problems using basic or increasingly sophisticated tools and techniques of science. Silvertown (2009) lists three reasons for the explosion of citizen science in the last decade. The first is the availability of powerful new tools allowing everyone to participate and contribute to "real science" projects. The second is the growing awareness of the value in work produced by distributed volunteer labor pools and the associated ingenuity of these diverse networks.  (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). Open science projects aim to make this process easier and more accessible by not only disseminating the results of student work, but also by making the process by which science is conducted more visible to learners.

Expanding access.
Many academics receive all or the vast majority of their personal income from the educational institution that employs them or from a related research grant. Unlike commercial authors, these creators are not primarily motivated by the prospect of financial return, partially because they benefit from a substantial institutional economic security blanket. For most academics publishing is motivated by peer recognition that is translated into institutional raises and promotions, opportunities for travel, and occasionally small fee for service contracts. Thus, the prospect of tens or hundreds of thousands of online readers is more attractive than tens or hundreds of readers of printbased journal products.

Special needs of developing countries.
The case for extending access to academics in developing countries and to those amateurs and professionals throughout the world who are not associated with a university or government research library is both compelling and obvious. Even a small university such as my own (Athabasca University), with fewer than 150 full time academics, spends over $350,000 annually on subscriptions to commercial journal data bases. The more widely knowledge is circulated, the more likely it will be applied to solve problems and enhance quality of life on this planet. The gap between demand for higher education opportunity and provision by the public education systems or at affordable rates from the private sector is large and growing (Altbach, Reisber, & Rumbley, 2009).
Other articles in this special issue overview the opportunity and remaining challenges of both improving quality and decreasing costs through the use of open educational resources for teaching and learning. But there is an equally compelling need for publication opportunities for scholars in the developing world. Unless these countries are actively producing as well as consuming knowledge, they will be relegated to new forms of colonial dependency. Open access solutions that require large author fees for publication will also act as a disincentive for scholars from developing countries.
None of the rationales above fuel the profits that publishers have enjoyed from proprietary models of academic publishing, thus I turn next to a more detailed look at the business case of open access scholarly publication. It seems obvious that reform within this industry is long overdue and that excessive profit-taking on the part of the commercial publishers in this sector must be challenged and eliminated.

Who Pays for Open Access
OA publication is nearly always done electronically and thus is usually cheaper to produce than print production; however, it is not cost free. The Budapest Open Access

Initiative FAQ puts it succinctly:
Free is ambiguous. We mean free for readers, not free for producers. We know that open-access literature is not free (without cost) to produce. But that does not foreclose the possibility of making it free of charge (without price) for readers and users.
There are a number of models for generating revenue to cover the cost of production including both supply side funding (payment by procures) and demand side funding that is accrued in some form through the readers' use. the full text of articles published in Educational Researcher, even though they pay Sage for publishing these articles); • additional products or services sold, with the OA content given away as a sort of "loss leader" or as an inducement to purchase enhanced goods; in a 2010 study of open access text books published by Flat World Publishing, Hilton and Wiley (2010) report that 39% of students purchased hard copies of assigned texts, even though electronic versions were available at no charge; In many studies that compare the citation rates for articles published in open access versus proprietary journals, the proprietary journals are significantly older. Since publication longitivity is related to prestige and acceptance on library shelves and in publishers' databases, it is not surprising to find that closed articles will be cited more often -simply because they are assumed to be of higher worth, given the older and more prestigious publications in which they appear. Despite this bias, a study conducted by Zawacki-Richter and me in (2010)  As we see OA articles are distributed much more widely and have equal or better likelihood of being cited by other scholars. But are there other differences? In an interesting study Verspoor, Cohen, and Hunter (2009) compared the linguistic, grammatical, and textual characteristics of a large sample of science articles and concluded, "We did not find structural or semantic differences between the Open Access and traditional journal collections." The data above confirms that, typical of emerging disruptive technologies (Christensen, 1997 Nonetheless individual efforts by publishers continue and are often celebrated by early adopters. Figure  Finally, there are a number of other benefits that are more associated with electronic publishing in general than strictly open access publishing. These include hyperlinks to full data sets, automatic updates to data presented in publications, and the ease of retraction or correction to published articles. For example, at IRRODL we have also been able to expand special issue collections by linking articles in the table of contents to works published later on the topic but after the special issue has " gone to press".

Conclusion
The arguments and examples detailed in this article point to the disruptive nature of OA publishing of scholarly works. Christensen (1997) described low-end disruptive technologies as ones that initially provide inferior product to that of the existing product, but at a much lower cost and much higher accessibility. The new product is typically not initially valued nor desired by established customers, but the disruptive innovation opens a door to whole new groups of consumers. Over time, the disruptive product becomes more functional and attractive until it replaces the traditional product. Although academics are not known for their speed in adopting any new product, and, correspondingly, publishers are loathe to give up profitable products, we are in the midst of a rapid transition from closed to open access publishing. This disruptive transition benefits ordinary citizens and scholars in both developed and developing countries and is a major contributor to the openness and transparency associated with our networked society.
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