Open Access as Undergraduate Pedagogy | Backtalk

"Open Access (OA) is usually associated with academic scholarship and its relationship to the “paywall” by proponents and critics alike. Librarians and faculty have long been using OA as a way to challenge for-profit publishing monopolies and the barriers they create to the transmission, distribution, and consumption of information. In response to this trend, recent critics of an expanding OA movement in higher education include the American Historical Association (AHA), which in the summer of 2013 championed a six-year embargo on history dissertations, believing this would protect junior colleagues’ intellectual property rights. Many librarians and scholars have pushed back, arguing that the organization’s action is too guild-centric. In the wake of the AHA decision and sustained polarization among higher education faculty, it is essential to consider the question of OA not only in terms of its impact on publishers and scholars, but in terms of its teaching and learning potential for students and educators. Doctoral dissertations and master’s theses are frequently shared in open access repositories, but what effect might formally expanding OA to undergraduate work have on pedagogy and the learner experience? What are the implications for creating access to emerging undergraduate scholarship, particularly in a context in which considerations of professional-level publication are of less urgent import? The authors of this article wrote undergraduate theses (Booth at Reed College, Miller at Pitzer College) that ended up locked in a library tower and a filing cabinet, respectively. But obscurity is not the final resting place for theses written for the Claremont Colleges five-campus major in Environmental Analysis (EA). Consider a recent Pitzer graduate, Mary Ferguson (’12), author of Sediment Removal from the San Gabriel Mountains. She enrolled in the required thesis class at Pomona College, which included librarian-led workshops focused on making full use of available information resources and the responsibilities of OA publication, such as vigorous source material attribution and obtaining permissions from content creators. Armed with new understanding, Mary then wrote her thesis with a worldwide audience in mind. Since 2011, EA seniors with theses graded B and above have been required to submit their work to Scholarship @ Claremont (S@C), the Claremont Colleges Library’s OA repository. A growing number of institutions are adopting similar OA capstone requirements for undergraduates as well as graduate students. These raise the stakes of academic work, reinforce the meaning of information literacy and research accountability, and, as has been the case in the EA program, can actually reduce grade inflation by simultaneously raising and equalizing expectations. It creates transparency about what excellent work is supposed to look like on a peer to peer basis, both because we’re teaching specifically to an information literacy skillset that prepares theses for the OA repository and by simple virtue of the work being out there for all to view ..."