There are two commonly used approaches to open access publishing: the Gold route, whereby the author or research funder pays a publisher for the cost of making an article open; and the Green route, where the individual author self-archives the article. Some journals have begun to experiment with open review where the reviewers’ comments are made public and not anonymised. Others adopt a low threshold for acceptance, replacing peer review selection with post publishing commentary.
Themes
Comments
- Tony Hirst on Publisher led mini-courses
- admin on Seamless learning
- Nataly on Seamless learning
- George on MOOCs
- Muvaffak GOZAYDIN on MOOCs
Admin
The puzzle for me is why this section is included in ‘innovative pedagogies’. Open publishing an interesting development for all academic research, but why for this report? The case is not made for its inclusion and it nowhere discusses teaching or learning. If it’s meant as a metaphor for summative assessment it could be seen as relevant perhaps, but that argument is not made.
In what sense do the authors see this as being an innovative pedagogy?
That’s a good question Diana!
We discussed whether to include rebirth of academic publishing in this report and decided to keep it in, in part for the response it might provoke about the relationship between publishing and pedagogy. A case could be made that teaching through study texts is still a core activity in higher education, so understanding how that process is changing, and could change, is important for exploring the future of teaching, learning and assessment. New business models and methods of peer review might open up markets for a ‘long tail’ of education. It could enable peer publishing by students, for students. It also problematises the surplus labour of academics, and how this could be refocused towards more effective and less exploitative pedagogy.
“This should mean that the research councils will now fund the extra costs to an author of publishing in open access journals” – which means less funding for the research itself. It also excludes authors who do not have RC funding. And it does nothing to counter the stranglehold of the commercial publishers.
If the Gold model does encourage researchers towards the open access journals, then that will be a good result, but to be successful in the long term requires collective action by all the best researchers to work against their own short-term best interests.
The chapter outlines the PLoS One model, which is the most interesting because its focus on quality needs well-managed peer review, while ‘impact’ and ‘relevance’ are probably better judged through crowd-sourcing on open access.
The Finch Report, which favours the Gold route to open access, has now had its recommendations accepted by the UK Government. The backing has been announced by David Willetts on 16 July 2012 as described in this Times Higher Education Supplement article. This should mean that the research councils will now fund the extra costs to an author of publishing in open access journals, but there is probably no new money overall to help them do this. The new RCUK policy intention is for published research to be open after 1 April 2013. The result could well be to encourage people as much towards those journals that are open access at no cost or allow open self-archiving as much as those taking the Gold route.
Maybe the rebirth of academic publishing is getting a bit closer.