Open access benefits the lifelong learner healthcare professional and the public
I’m Johnny a Clinical Teaching Fellow in Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery (Dental programme) at the University of Manchester (UoM) and this is my first attempt at blogging which for me was a daunting prospect. I have a dual role as I deliver some of the academic elements of the post graduate diploma and MSc programmes as well as clinical supervision of the post graduate and occasionally undergraduate students. There is a considerable overlap of these roles and I considered how inhibitory it would be for our students education and development if as mentors we were forced to only ‘provide Access' to information and guidance which we deemed to fall directly within the curriculum of the course on which they were enrolled.
In terms of open access (OA) the UoM defines this as “scholarly work are made available online, in a digital format, at no charge to the reader and with limited restrictions on re-use”. The University requires peer reviewed research to be OA with some funders requiring gold access.
As I began reading about openness I started to think about the implications for my students who are of course lifelong learners as well practicing (or soon to be) practicing healthcare professionals. Their role demands that they remain up to date with ‘best practice’ to ensure that they can deliver (or at least always strive to) the highest standard of care (General Dental Council Standard) for their patients based on sound scientific evidence. Although its often debatable as to how much of what we teach our students is actually based on the ‘highest level evidence’. In our role as educators we hopefully equip both our undergraduate and postgraduate students to be able to independently evaluate the evidence they are presented with and OA aids this.
Despite considering myself relatively young (I was born in 1983 so I’m not really!) although having to write a blog has certainly made me feel my age (given that ‘blogging’ at least in my mind is a relatively new concept). I considered the changes I have seen in the availability of learning resources. I’m fortunate enough to have seen the transition from BBC computers when I was in primary school to the development of hardware that allows real time access to social media and online access to articles and educational resources. I was an undergraduate at Newcastle and we had overhead projector aided seminars and lectures as well as the then relatively new virtual leaning environment (VLE) of Blackboard. I recall that back then (between 2001–2006) myself and several of my fellow students preferred to have a printed copy of presented material (not environmentally friendly!).
My children enjoy a world in which the answer (or at least an answer(s)) to almost any question is but a few finger taps away. However, it’s interesting to note that at least in the case of my eldest child (aged 8), she still requires ‘validation’ and direction in much the same way as our students do. In the context of higher education, the mere availability of published research does not guarantee that it will be found or interpreted appropriately.
I hadn’t thought very much about open access until this educational module, or really stopped to consider the obvious advantages. In terms of healthcare research, one might argue that there is an ethical obligation to ensure that all ‘appropriate’ research is available for the improvement of patient care.
My role in the university has given me access to a valuable resource in the form of a comparatively vast multidisciplinary professional network (when compared for example to some of my general practice colleagues), compromised of individuals from a variety of academic and clinical backgrounds. In my previous comments, I mentioned how the professional role of our students places a requirement on them to embrace the principles of ‘best practice’. I’m a member of the Facebook group ‘for dentists by dentists’. This is a closed group requiring a General Dental Council registration number; the thinking of the group moderator being that to add ‘value’ to the forum one must be a qualified practicing dentist (I think there are perhaps several counter arguments to this train of thought though…). One of the first thoughts I had about this group was that although compromised of Professionals; that advice including clinical/care advice is being asked for and offered without the absolute need for that advice to be ‘qualified’. Clearly it is the duty of the professional to validate the information, however I wonder if the resource isn’t simply used in some cases for its convenience rather than because the members feel that it is the best source of information. We encourage our students to access articles from ‘peer reviewed’ journals with a high impact factor, although I always explain to my students that any research needs to be interpreted according to the intended use of the information presented. It is often key for our students to be able to differentiate between statistically significant and clinically relevant.
One of the Professional organisations I’m a member of has produced educational clinical videos. These videos, a type of reusable learning object (RLO) have been valuable to me as a reference point for teaching certain clinical subjects. Unfortunately (at present) they are only available to paid members, the fee for membership may very well be prohibitive for some students who already pay very significant fees for their respective post graduate programmes.
There is an argument that as research is funded by the public taxpayer that is a reasonable expectation that publications are freely available to them. Within the sphere of healthcare the ability for a patient to make an ‘informed decision’ is certainly aided by the ability to access the latest evidence about their condition or proposed treatment options. As discussed however it is important that the information be available in a format and language that the individual can understand. As such OA can now be facilitated by more modern approaches to the dissemination of information such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and jargon free websites and blogs are important in reducing barriers to knowledge acquisition and allow an open discussion with authors, fellow researches and any interested parties.
