Open Access and criticality

Michael Stevenson
Sep 3, 2018 · 10 min read

In this piece I will put forward my own support for open access before hitting the brakes — information is not much good without criticality. And more information requires more criticality.

“books over green trolley bin” by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

The case for Open Access

Open Access (OA) is the free availability to scholarly works on the internet. It allows people to access and use these works and ideas as they wish; printing, copying, distributing, searching or linking to the papers. It allows for the machine reading of these works, allowing them to be indexed or parsed as data by text-mining. It allows for any other lawful use without the barriers of cost, legal or technical barriers.

My view

I’d (rather grandly) describe my support for the OA movement as being threefold — philosophical, political, and pragmatic.

Philosophical:

This is the flimsiest and perhaps most personal of my reasons for supporting OA — so a good place to start! It has a lot to do with what I consider to be the purpose of higher education and universities — something that was discussed at length in the semester 1 Changing Landscape of Higher Education unit. Stefan Collini discusses the purpose of universities at (book) length and, though a difficult question to answer, I believe that the creation of new knowledge (for its own sake) is at least part of it.

Some of the ideas which are generated in universities have obvious commercial applications. It is no surprise to see ‘innovation centres’ and commercialisation programmes within research intensive universities. Some ideas require the expertise of industry to realise their potential — graphene and the University of Manchester (and the race to put this wonder-material to good use) provides a good example. But many more of those ideas that come out of university research that have no obvious commercial value and no immediate application outside of the world of academia. The ‘value’ of such research may be questioned (and I’ll leave Collini to that defence) but it is clear that money isn’t it.

All of which gets me round to saying ‘so why put these ideas behind a paywall?’ There are many ideas which are interesting to people who are not at a higher education institution, and so are often without free access to them. There are higher education institutions without the large budgets required to afford access, or within countries with lower budgets than those nations with high academic research outputs.

There are plenty of ways for the generation of knowledge to generate money. In many organisations this is the main reason for generating new knowledge. Universities are perhaps one of the few places where that isn’t, or doesn’t have to be, the main objective.

Political:

Incredulity — the reaction to understanding the business model of academic publishers. This from the general public and those working in academia alike. An industry which relies on state funding bodies to pay the workers to produce the product, for the workers to ensure the quality of the product, before the workers buy the product (that they have produced and checked!) back, using more state funding. An industry with profit margins practically unheard of elsewhere.

A move towards OA publishing (and specifically OA journals) is one way that this norm can be disrupted. Disputes in Germany and Sweden show a commitment to challenge the present model in support of greater OA.

Pragmatic:

I had discussion with a representative from Elsevier on the sharing of full texts through their Mendeley platform, in which he mentioned how the academic publishing industry wanted to avoid becoming the next music industry, with regards to piracy.

PDFs are already an easy format to share across multiple platforms and though digital rights management gets ever more sophisticated in protecting EPUB formatted scholarly works, so too do the pirates making the materials available (illegally) for free. There are even suggestions that the existence of these illegal platforms are providing tacit leverage for national disputes with Elsevier.

Benefits for those creating knowledge

It’s clear that I am convinced of the arguments for OA. But as someone only recently and tentatively dipping my toe in the creation and sharing of new knowledge and ideas (and, let’s face it, as a librarian!) I might not be the one who needs convincing.

Researchers might be motivated to create new knowledge by a number of things — career progression, the respect of their peers, and perhaps even the monetary outcomes to the application of their ideas. The main reason for the publishing of papers on academic research is to disseminate research findings and share new ideas. So how can OA help to do this?

One way to know that those ideas are reaching one’s peers is through the number of citations the paper receives. This gives an indication, within the academic sphere, of how the paper is being used and built upon by peers. A 2015 paper showed how those articles published OA were better cited than those non-OA papers in the same journal. If you want your paper to be better cited, choose OA.

Less surprisingly, if you want your paper to be better viewed, choose OA. The same paper showed a much larger difference in the number of views received between OA and non-OA papers. Unlike citations, where we know who is making use of the paper, it is more difficult to know who is making use of the researcher’s ideas — whether peers, university students, interested members of the public, or just those clicking the first results on Google. But three times as many views of one’s paper is not to be sniffed at!

Finally, while we are talking numbers, how can we measure the reach of our papers beyond the number of citations it has received? That’s where altmetrics come in. These measures take into account the number of citations and views but also the number of times the paper has been discussed (eg, tweeted), the number of times it has been saved (on platforms such as Mendeley) and the number of times it has been recommended (on F1000prime). Altogether this gives the paper a score. That’s quite a number of resources to get my head around and fortunately some research has been done on the impact of OA on altmetric scores. I think that the most fascinating result here is the increase in tweets of OA papers from users who don’t regularly tweet academic papers. There must be some excitement to see one’s paper being discussed by people who don’t often discuss academic papers!

There are undoubtedly reasons for researchers to eschew OA when choosing where to publish their paper, and OA can mean different things depending on the type of OA chosen. We will look at these — and other arguments against OA. We might also consider how the internet opened up the creation of news media through user generated content.

Open journalism — a precedent

The rise of OA publishing is not the first large-scale migration of information from a paid-for to free-for-all model — the same has already happened to the news media. The immediate availability of news information on the World Wide Web posed, and continues to pose, an existential threat to the print-based news media. In a world where anyone can report on current events in real-time using a platform that is free or near-free, why would anyone wait for a newspaper to be published? And then, why would they pay for it? Even with rolling 24 hour news coverage from established sources, why would I wait for the bit I’m interested in to roll around when I can tailor my personal news feed, or go straight to the thing I want?

Most established news organisations have an editorial policy, just as academic journals do. Though we might not know them word-for-word, some are a hot-topic of national debate. For many, we perhaps have a feel for the position taken by the editorial team, and our personal biases fill in the rest. As an aside, and from a librarian’s perspective, whatever I might think about the merits of the arguments on either side, it’s nice to see information literacy in action in day-to-day life!

The important thing is that many well-established news organisations have an editorial policy, in differing degrees of detail, which is available to its consumers. Even without an explicit editorial policy, many of these organisations have been in the public consciousness long enough that we have an unconscious understanding of the positions taken and the biases held by these organisations. It’s not exactly criticality but it’s generally a good place for us to start. But what is the editorial policy (read: personal opinion) of Joe Bloggs’ blog? What are the underlying biases (read: late night rantings) of @moggies4moggs’ live tweeting on Brexit negotiations? And what about this Medium piece? I hope that it’s clear that it is an opinion piece (and I have tried to keep my examples as even-handed as I can!) but I can’t rid myself of bias completely (hence you’ll find no links to The S*n!)

Blogging, tweeting and other user generated content — and the criticality it requires of us — are starting to feel like the good old days! Far more pernicious is the rise of fake news, troll farms across social media platforms, not to mention a POTUS with a penchant of sending his opinions with little regard for facts. If we can (clutching at straws) take one positive from the present information landscape we find ourselves in it is that we cannot necessary take for granted the old authorities, and the waiving of our criticality that went with it.

But surely these we in academia are immune to such issues? In fact, surely we can help. We are perhaps even more open to misinformation and poor fact-checking, having become so confident of our own critical abilities and complacent about the structures in place within scholarly publishing. So perhaps not.

Some things to consider

Ian Bailey, in his OKHE1 post, presented compelling reasons to buck this trend of ever-expanding publication of papers — with the case made both from the papers’ educative qualities and from those other qualities, such as prestige and visibility, adding to the already overwhelming ‘publish or perish’ culture.

Paul Shore also cited prestige as a barrier to the uptake of OA publishing. He particularly mentions quality — both that bestowed on the paper by virtue of being published in a prestigious journal and the more quantifiable journal impact factor.

OA does not benefit everyone, nor does it spread the benefits evenly. It might be easy for a researcher convinced of the benefits but perhaps less so for an early career researcher who has the opportunity to publish in a more prestigious but pay-walled journal.

There also has to be recognition of the costs involved in publishing, even with the increased trend towards online only. I have outline how academic staff create and quality assure content but there are other aspects to publishing, such as typesetting, marketing and the hosting of content, which all need paying for.

I believe that the issue that affects us all (producers and consumers) when it comes to OA is the need for ever more criticality. As more and more papers are published and increasingly OA, we all have more information available to us. Though I think I have made clear that this is a good thing it means that there is more information for us to critically consider.

I used to know what was good

Experienced researchers (and librarians) know the journals in their field. They know which journals carry the most prestige and which are best suited — not only to the subject of their research but also the type of paper they are submitting. Chances are they know, or know of, members of the editorial board and what they are looking for. They also know all of this as consumers of the research within these journals.

Many of these same journal have an OA policy. Some allow authors to submit their papers with an article processing charge (APC) through the Gold Open Access model. Others make the papers they publish OA after a certain period of time, within the journal’s online platform. Finally, some journal publishers allow a version of the paper (often the pre-publication version without the publisher’s typesetting) to be made available in the author’s university’s institutional repository, either immediately or after an embargo period. I’ll not talk about the pros and cons of these policies here, other than to say that these options require little additional criticality from the experienced consumer of scholarly content (the same papers are in the same journals). The rise of new OA journals, however, might do.

Predatory journals

A further difficulty are those unscrupulous types looking to cash in on the good will of researchers and the requirements of their funders — predatory journals. Predatory journals charge researchers to publish in them, without providing the qualities associated with an APC, such as peer review and editorial services. Undoubtedly this is bad news and authors looking at publishing in a journal they have not heard of before should think carefully and critically before doing so, seeking the advice of peers, their librarian or an organisation like Think Check Submit.

While an obvious danger for researchers seeking a publisher, predatory journals also pose a threat to those seeking good quality research. Journals posing as reputable publications make use of our expectations, as consumers of scholarly works, of the kind of quality we find in those reputable publications. We expect journal articles to have been peer reviewed by other experts who understand the article content, and for those articles to have been edited to ensure that mistakes are minimised.

If we can agree that predatory journals are a threat to researchers, how does that effect those less experienced — such as undergraduate students? I can (and get paid to) bang on about the importance of information literacy and finding good quality sources. I am also well aware of the competing pressures and priorities of being a student. And I won’t lie — I use Google Scholar when looking for scholarly literature. But how confident can we be that the results are from reputable publishers? Worryingly for librarians, academic staff (and particularly dissertation supervisors!), it seems that the number of results from predatory journals are more numerous the more specific the search terms are!

The controversy surrounding Beall’s List, demonstrates the difficulty in determining whether a new journal is predatory or not. Some things may obviously give the game away, such as poor spelling and grammar. Other clues, such as an ‘about’ page targeting authors may not be so easily spotted when we are consuming content — where we might access the journal at article level. You can find some helpful advice here. Sometimes though, you just have to trust your critical abilities and go with your instinct.

Open Knowledge in HE

Exploring themes of open knowledge in higher education.

Michael Stevenson

Written by

Teaching and Learning Librarian at the University of Manchester, runner on the streets and paths of Manchester and Bury, guitarist in my bedroom

Open Knowledge in HE

Exploring themes of open knowledge in higher education.

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