The Next Step in Open Access Publishing // Culture Digitally

“In the wake of the demonstration against Elsevier, Chris Boulton and I recently authored a brief piece discussing some of the surrounding issues that are getting more widely known due to the academic outcry... Even The Economist has taken note of the uprising, and although the term ‘Academic Spring’ is, in my opinion, an unfortunate choice of words, their interest in academic publishing indicates that others are becoming aware of the impending ‘revolution’ in our ancient and outdated system. Considering the current budget crisis, this comes as no surprise. Most University Libraries pay over  60% of their materials budget on serial publications. My institution, the University of Massachusetts Amherst spends about three-quarters of their materials budget on serials. It comes as no surprise that they have been encouraging Open Access publishing with their ScholarWorks initiative, now with over 28,000 papers in their repository (with nearly 1.4 million downloads) ... The two largest associations in my own discipline, Communication Studies, the International Communication Association (ICA) and the National Communication Association (NCA), have recently released statements regarding the ‘future’ of academic publishing... There is a slightly less publicized ‘revolution’ happening in the educational publication market, that of textbooks. Recently, Washington State passed a bill encouraging using and developing Open Educational Resources (OERs) for their K-12 school systems. From the linked article: ‘This legislature has declared that the status quo — $130M / year for expensive, paper-only textbooks that are, on average, 7-11 years out of date — is unacceptable. WA policy makers instead decided their 1 million+ elementary students deserve better and they have acted.’ Of course we do not need to wait for a government mandate to use and develop OERs for our classes. Textbooks are expensive at every level of education, and in Higher Education they can be prohibitively expensive... There are already many resources available online, including Creative Commons’ OER repository. More resources are needed for many different disciplines, ones that we can share and remix to best fit our specific style of teaching and needs for our individual classes. MIT, Yale, and the Khan Academy have made OpenCourseWare quite famous with their offerings of free education... institutional support is incredibly helpful. UMass is lucky to have such support, and over the past two semesters has invested a total of $26,000 to give 21 faculty members grants for replacing high-cost textbooks with OERs and library resources in 30 courses. These small $1k microgrants (per course) have impacted 1,700 students with an estimated total savings of $207,000 in only two semesters. These savings keep adding up, as Provost James V. Staros, a major proponent of these OER microgrants, remarks:  ‘these savings recur each time the courses are offered, and directly benefit the very real and very tight budgets of our undergraduate and graduate students.’ This is a wonderful middle ground that many educators and administrators can get behind, one that encourages the production of knowledge while keeping student costs down, ensuring access to the best possible resources. These OERs created through these grants are, of course, not just for UMass students. They are accessible to anyone, anywhere. Charlie Schweik, a professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation, has had his OER lab manual downloaded 72 times since it was added in November 2011, and not just by UMass students... This should get us all thinking about the incredible resources that we could share with our students and each other if we all contributed to OERs rather than selling our textbooks to publishers... And when we are done thinking, we should get involved – using OERs, creating OERs, and lobbying our administrations to support these endeavors. For more information about OERs and other Open Access education initiatives, check out Open Education Week, happening this week...”