Open Access and Open Education Resources

Open access means that something is freely available online. For something to be considered open access (OA), it must be digital and publicly available online. Additionally, OA materials must be free of copyright and licensing restrictions. OA has no price or permission barriers to limit anyone's access to them.  (Suber, 2007, p. 171). For a more complete description, please read the chapter, Creating an Intellectual Commons Through Open Access by Peter Suber.

The video below explains the rationale for making information free to serve the needs of a broader society. (e.g.) When we share information and knowledge, we collectively benefit from doing so. "Open access of information provides a universal public good: the more quality information, the greater the public good" (Hess & Ostrom, 2007, p.13)

Important components of the OA model include:

1. Authors keep their copyrights.
2. Zero embargo period.
3. Share the research data with the article.
4. Add a Creative Commons license to the research article that enables text and data mining (any of the licenses work, but CC BY is preferred).

“5.1 Open Access to Scholarship” by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.

Why does OA matter to me and my students?

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, explains that scholarly research is essential to improving outcomes for everyone worldwide. When we share scientific breakthroughs, we innovate in ways that benefit all of us, regardless of geography, culture, or socioeconomic status. 

Digital technology permits us to communicate research with an ease we didn't imagine back when monks transcribed individual texts by hand. Unfortunately, our scholarly publishing model hasn't kept pace with these changes.

1. Governments provide most of the funding for research—hundreds of billions of dollars annually—and public institutions employ a large portion of all researchers.
2. Researchers publish their findings without the expectation of compensation. Unlike other authors, they hand their work over to publishers without payment to advance human knowledge.
3. Through peer review, researchers review each other’s work for free.
4. Once published, those who contributed to the research (from taxpayers to the institutions that supported it) must pay again to access the findings. Though research is produced as a public good, it isn’t available to the public who paid for it.

In short, our traditional publishing model requires a) taxpayers to subsidize research, b) pay for colleges to have access to the databases that house the work their scholars produced, and c) one they are no longer affiliated with an institutional library that can afford these exorbitant subscription costs, taxpayers pay once more - directly to the publisher - to gain access to the research. Students and faculty are disadvantaged in this outdated and unethical model for distributing information that is a public good. Since the cost of research databases increases each year, college and university libraries struggle to ensure access for students and faculty, and that lack of access hurts us all. 

How can I publish my work OA?

There are three models of OA publishing: Green OA, Gold OA, and Diamond OA:

Green OA = ​making a version of the manuscript freely available in a repository, also known as self-archiving. An example of green OA is a university research repository. (e.g. Arizona State University Digital Repository).

Source: based on Oberländer, A. (2020). Open Access – Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt. In: Open Science: Von Daten zu Publikationen Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/4018594

Gold OA = making the final version of the manuscript freely available immediately upon publication by the publisher, typically by publishing in an Open Access journal and making the article available under an open license. Typically, Open Access journals charge an Article Processing Charge (APC) when an author wishes to (a) publish an article online, allowing for free public access, and (b) retain the copyright to the article. APCs range from $0 to several thousand dollars per article. Read more about APCs at Wikipedia. An example of a gold OA journal is PLOS.

Source: based on Oberländer, A. (2020). Open Access – Es ist nicht alles Gold, was glänzt. In: Open Science. Von Daten zu Publikationen. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4018594  (CC BY 4.0 International)

Diamond OA = a scholarly publication model in which journals do not charge fees to either authors or readers. Diamond OA journals are community-driven, academic-led, and -owned publishing initiatives. Diamond OA journals are designed to be equitable by nature and design and seek to support bibliodiversity through multilingual and multicultural scholarly communities. Diamond OA journals can be found by searching the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). DOAJ includes journals that charge fees, but has a filter for journals that don’t charge APCs. It currently lists over 13,000 open-access journals without fees. 

“5.1 Open Access to Scholarship” by Creative Commons. CC BY 4.0.

We know that one of the most pervasive barriers to education is cost. Therefore, community colleges must provide high-quality, authoritative educational materials to students at the lowest possible cost, ideally for free. Fortunately, an abundance of excellent textbooks, videos, learning objects, images, courses, etc., are available for free online, which allows us to reduce our dependency on costly textbooks.

Open educational resources (OER) are defined as "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others." (Bliss & Smith, 2017, p. 12). Licensing is made possible with Creative Commons licenses, which allow authors to choose how they wish to share their original content and still receive attribution for their work. 

​Open does not mean we can use and share everything we find online. We must abide by copyright restrictions and licenses and use material licensed in a manner that provides users with free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities.