Open Access and the Global (MBA) Audience
Why this topic?
This is my first attempt at any kind of blogging. I am not really one for sharing my thoughts on the World Wide Web (although I will admit to the occasional ranting Facebook status!). I have decided to use my first foray into the world of blogging to investigate whether Open Access (OA) is really fully open for a global audience. In the interest of ‘openness’ it is worth pointing out that I didn’t really have a huge amount of knowledge of OA until I started the PG Certificate in HE. For anyone who may also be unsure of the meaning, the University of Manchester’s (UoM) definition of Open Access is: items of scholarly work are made available online, in a digital format, at no charge to the reader and with limited restrictions on re-use. My previous job was a secondary school Geography teacher and I would have loved to have known about this at the time — I think it’s great for people like teachers who might otherwise not be able to access the latest research.
My interest in this topic also stems from my role at the UoM. As I mentioned above, I didn’t really know anything about OA before starting the Open Knowledge in Higher Education (OKHE) course in January 2018. Two of the questions that we were asked to reflect on after the third OKHE session were: What can Universities do more of in the area of open research? What can you do, regardless of your role, to support this? I’m not an academic member of staff but from my Professional Support Staff (PSS) role, I recognise that improved OA could have a big impact for the students that I support as well as myself and my colleagues.
A confession…
From a rather selfish perspective, increased OA would actually relieve my overflowing inbox from students enquiring how to gain access to certain papers or journals without having to pay for them! I work as a student adviser on the Global MBA (GMBA) programme in Alliance Manchester Business School. It is a distance, blended learning programme with students originating from over 30 different countries — hence my interest in OA for the global audience. Having attended the OKHE sessions and now being a firm advocate for OA, I would like to be able to promote this type of material and encourage the GMBA students to make their own projects available for OA. However, I want to firstly double check that OA is really fully accessible for the global audience.
Why GMBAs specifically?
Increased OA for GMBAs would have the same major advantage as it would for most people: this journal article explains that rapid and widespread access to research findings [would mean that] that all communities have the opportunity to build upon them. Aside from their widespread locations, I think that OA also presents other distinct advantages for GMBA students and distance learners:
- They might have previously studied at University but this could have been some time ago. Others have never received formal qualifications but are accepted onto the GMBA due to their business experience. I think it’s important to emphasize this point because these types of students may have never had any kind of experience of having to search for academic articles in journals or databases as they have never attended university before. Nearly all of them also work full time and may have family responsibilities so are considered ‘time poor’. Therefore OA would be a distinct advantage for them as they could find material much more easily online.
- One of the UoM’s 2020 goals is to improve the student experience including that of distance learners so I also think it’s useful to look into OA with that in mind. Increased OA would undoubtedly improve the student experience by removing frustration over paywalls for many journals or articles.
- I mentioned that the GMBA is ‘blended learning’ above. Blended learning combines face to face sessions with online study and the idea behind it is that the content can facilitate anytime/anywhere learning. As OA means greater access for society at large it seems obvious that any student would benefit from easy, free access. In the case of GMBA students, the amount of independent study required (at least fifteen hours per week) from wherever they might be located in the world makes me think that OA would probably be even more of a benefit to them than it would be to others. Obviously they have library access in the same way that any other UoM student does but this isn’t always enough — there are inevitably always some useful journals or articles which they would need to pay to access. Tennant et al.’s overview of OA points out that a subscription to all peer-reviewed journals is not affordable for any single individual, research institute or university so no student would ever be able to fully access every resource they find — unless OA becomes more widespread.
- GMBA students based in China are often unable to access a lot of UoM library content due to strict restrictions imposed by the Chinese government. OA would hopefully eliminate many issues that they face by trying to access our VPN — as this Guardian article explains, VPNs are blocked.
So is OA possible for a Global (MBA) audience?
OA should be available in all corners of the globe because the online environment makes it possible for the research community to take back ownership of scholarly communication (explained in detail in this blog post). It’s expected that all GMBA students should have a decent internet connection as otherwise a distance learning course wouldn’t be possible! However, I think it’s also interesting to look at whether all countries that these students originate from promote OA. Many GMBA students focus their own projects on a specific region of the world/industry so OA research from their own area would be really useful.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that many regions in the world actively encourage OA for their academic communities. For example, in this UNESCO article it explains that in Latin America and the Caribbean two thirds of funding for OA come from public funding. Perhaps the key point in this blog post is that OA is already ‘the norm’ in Latin America and costs are shared so no individual (researcher/author) takes any kind of financial hit. Articles and blogs like these are really encouraging as I had my suspicions that OA might be mainly confined to ‘wealthier’ Western countries.
Other people seem to share my original suspicions; in another blog post that I found about OA, the author mentions that they are conscious that discussions around OA tend to be dominated by those based in the developed world but this is changing to include areas like Latin America. About two weeks ago, UCL Press (the UK’s first fully OA University Press) also announced that it has reached one million downloads, including in developing countries as far flung as Haiti.
The main country where OA is not so accessible seems to be China. A large percentage of GMBA students live and work in China so this could be problematic for them — I mentioned above about their ongoing issues with accessing UoM content and it seems that they may not be able to access OA content from other areas either! However, OA research from within China has evolved at a rapid pace so this might go someway towards assisting the Chinese students.
Having looked into OA for my GMBA students in more detail, I’m confident that the vast majority of them can really reap the benefits. I am now aiming to be promote it to them in my own professional practice as their student adviser.
