Keynote at EL@IES conference- delivered via videoconference. Dec 17, 2013

1. Open Educational Resources and Open
Access: Promise or Peril for Higher Education
Terry Anderson,
Professor, Athabasca University
Canada
Dec. 2013

2. Open Scholar
• “the Open Scholar is someone
who makes their intellectual
projects and processes digitally
visible and who invites and
encourages ongoing criticism of
their work and secondary uses
of any or all parts of it--at any
stage of its development”.
– Gideon Burton - Academic
Evolution Blog

3. Presentation Overview
• Open Scholarship
– Copyright
– Open Educational Resources
– Open Texts
– Open Data
– Open Article Publishing
– Creative Commons Licensing
– Open Practices and Policies

4. Open Scholars Create:
• A new type of education work maximizing:
– Social learning
– Media richness
– Participatory and connectivist pedagogies
– Ubiquity and persistence
– Transparency
– Open data collection and research process
– Network Creation

5. Definitions of Open on the Web
(From Google)
• affording unobstructed entrance and exit; not shut or
closed;
• affording free passage or access;
• open to or in view of all;
• accessible to all;
• assailable: not defended or capable of being defended
• loose: (of textures) full of small openings or gaps;
• start to operate or function
• not brought to a conclusion;
• not sealed or having been unsealed

6. Something there is that
doesn’t love a a wall,
that wants it down”
American Poet Robert Frost

7. • “publishing online is not a viable option as the
product would not have
permanency, scholarly recognition, or the
prestige of a paper publication.” my PhD
supervisor, 1993

9. ‘50% of Canada’s Scholarly Publications
will be out of business within two years
due to open access competition.’
Athabasca Pres. Frits Pannecock

11. • Cannot copyright:
– ideas,
– facts,
– data or
– useful articles (these are patented)

12. • “Indeed, only 1,000 new
works appeared annually in
England at that time -- 10
times fewer than in Germany
-- and this was not without
consequences.
EckhardHöffner believes it
was the chronically weak
book market that caused
England, the colonial
power, to fritter away its
head start within the span of
a century, while the
underdeveloped, agrarian
state of Germany caught up
rapidly, becoming an equally
developed industrial nation
by 1900.”
• UK Copyright Law 1710
• Prussia - 1837
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-sindustrial-expansion-a-710976.html

13. Open Access Definition
• Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001).
– “free availability on the public internet,
– permitting any users to
read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link
to the full texts of these articles,
– crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to
software, or
– use them for any other lawful purpose, without
financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.”
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess).

14. Open Scholars Use and Contribute
Open Educational Resources
Because it saves time!!!

15. OER Barriers to Adoption
•
•
•
•
•
Few instructor incentives
Publisher push back
Quality concerns
“not invented here” syndrome
Lack of open culture and practice

16. Open texts

17. We can’t afford textbooks
• Textbook prices skyrocketed 82% between 2002
and 2012,
• average student budget for books and supplies
has grown to $1,207 annually (USA figures).
• Current Bill to support open texts across US, goal
of reducing costs by 80%
• Washington State program since 2010 has saved
students $5.4 million versus State cost of less
than $1.8 Million
• All students get open text books!
http://www.sparc.arl.org/advocacy/national/act

18. South Africa school text books produces millions of texts -= http://www.siyavula.com/

20. Are commercial e-texts the answer?

21. DRM (Digital Rights Management)
You CANNOT
• Copy & paste, annotate, highlight
• Change Text to speech
• Format change
• Move material
• Print out
• Move geographically
• Use after expiry date
• Resell

22. But our device is our
PROPERTY
• DRM restricts our
freedom
• Can we not own &
control our own
property?
Nielsen.com

23. Commercial Learning Service
or Rent-a-book
• student owns nothing, can share
nothing, save nothing, sell nothing
• subscription ends – ALL ends
•publishers own student
data, notes, highlights
• students can’t transfer data

24. US Version cost per month
+100 000 movies
$ 7.99
+48 000 TV shows
$ 7.99
+20 000 000 songs
TOTAL
$ 9.99
$25.97
ONE Biology text
$20.25
-David Wiley

25. Open Scholars License, Use (and re-use )
Open Data

26. • “There is no turning back the clock on our
interconnected world, but we could jeopardize
its benefits if we fail to invest in a trusted data
environment”.
• -Ellen Richey, Chief Enterprise Risk
Officer, Visa, USA in WEF Blog on Big Data

28. Open Scholars Filter and
Share With Others

30. If it is not licensed,
it is not open

31. Open
OPEN
open
“openwashing: code that requires a patent
license cannot be open source, so Cisco should
really stop using that term. It's making the
source code available, and that's good
news, but it's not the same.” Glyn Moody
http://www.ourbreathingplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/greenwashcomic.png

32. Scholars Researching ‘Openness’
http://jime.open.ac.uk/

33. Open Scholars Know How to License
Their Work for Maximum Impact

34. CC Licensing Options

35. • “If Google cannot find a faculty scholar's work
or the work of the scholar's
colleagues, department, or institution, then it
is essentially irrelevant — even nonexistent —
because people will not find, read, apply, or
build on the work if they cannot locate it via a
quick Google searchLowenthal & Dunlap
(2012)
Lowenthal, P., & Dunlap, J. (2012). Intentional Web Presence: 10 SEO
Strategies Every Academic Needs to Know. Educause.
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/intentional-web-presence-10seo-strategies-every-academic-needs-know.

36. Journal Publishing
• Until recently, largely controlled by for profit
companies
• “profits of the journal publishing sectors of the
major publishers’ business are their most
profitable divisions.
• For example, the worlds largest publisher Elsevier
made “£724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2
billion—an operating-profit margin of 36%.”
http://www.economist.com/node/18744177.

37. “major periodical subscriptions, especially to
electronic journals published by historically key
providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these
subscriptions on their current footing is financially
untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection
efforts in many other areas, already compromised”.
The Faculty Advisory Council
Date: April 17, 2012
http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448

38. Open Access Publication Emerges
• Journal TOCs lists over 23,170 journals - 9,986 OA
titles make up 43% of the overall content. (DOAJ 2013)
• Publishing and Review Systems: Open Journal
System – Canadian, (SFU)
– Complete submission, review, copyedit, analytics and
publication system
– Over 7,000 journals using OJS (as of 2012)

39. Predatory Open Access Journals
“those that unprofessionally exploit the author-pays model of
open-access publishing (Gold OA) for their own profit.
Typically, these publishers:
• spam professional email lists,
• broadly soliciting article submissions for the clear purpose
of gaining income.
• operate essentially as vanity presses,
• typically have a low article acceptance threshold,
• Have a false-front or non-existent peer review process.
– Jeff Beall
http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/

40. • But Also Legitamet user-f
But also, Legitimate Author Fee- OA Journals –
PLOS - Public Library of Science since 2006
Charges authors about $1500/US per article

42. Publishers Reactions
• Ignore OA
• Fight It
– Lobby for anti-OA legislation
– Discredit OA quality
– Discriminate against OER in citation indexes
• Morph It
– Free your article in a closed journal for a fee (hybrid
model)
– Allow individual deposit in data bases (after embargo)

43. Green and Hybrid
Gold Open
Access
Open Access
Journal
Open Access
Journal
Free
Author Pay
Green Open
Access
Closed Articles
in Open
Repository –
After embargo

44. Institutional Archives
• Green versus Gold standard for openness
• Green: Author archives a copy of copyright
material in an institutional repository
• Gold: Full Open Access
• Responsibility of author to archive

46. # of Institutional Repositories
ValérieSpezi, Jenny Fry, Claire Creaser, Steve Probets, Sonya
White, (2013) "Researchers' green open access practice: a crossdisciplinary analysis", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 69 Iss: 3, pp.334

48. Do Faculty Self-Archive?
• Only 32% archived anything at Carnegie-Melon 2008
• Likely less at Athabasca in Portugal??.
• Only compulsory mandate works!!

49. It helps to have help
N=1,424 European Scholars
ValérieSpezi, Jenny Fry, Claire Creaser, Steve Probets, Sonya White, (2013)
"Researchers' green open access practice: a cross-disciplinary
analysis", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 69 Iss: 3, pp.334 - 359

50. OER Mandates
http://roarmap.eprints.org/

51. Must Universities pay for Both Closed
Journals and For Open Access
Publisher Fees?

52. Open Scholars Engage Open
Communities Beyond Higher Education.
PERRYMAN, L., COUGHLAN, T.. The realities of
‘reaching out’: enacting the public-facing open
scholar role with existing online communities.
Journal of Interactive Media in Education
http://jime.open.ac.uk/article/2013-21/html

53. Open Scholars Write and Read
Open Access Books
aupress.ca
www.irrodl.org
Teaching in Blended Learning
Environments: Creating and
Sustaining Communities of Inquiry
Vaughan, Cleveland-Innes,
& Garrison

54. A Tale of 3 Books
Commercial publisher
E-Learning for the
21stCentury 1st Ed.
934 copies sold at $52.00
Commercial Pub.
Buy at Amazon!!
1200 sold @ $135.00
2,000 copies in Arabic
Translation @ $8.
Open Access 100,000 + downloads &
Individual chapters
Trnaslations
Over 1600 hardcopies sold
@ $40 Can

55. www.irrodl.org

56. Does Open Access Increase or
Decrease Citation rates?
• Mixed results
• “Articles placed in the open access condition
(n=712) received significantly more downloads
and reached a broader audience within the
first year, yet were cited no more
frequently, nor earlier, than subscriptionaccess control articles (n=2533) within 3 yr.”
(Davis, 2011, P. 2129).

57. Does Open Access Increase or
Decrease Citation rates in our
discipline?
– Zawacki-Richter, O., Anderson, T., &Tuncay, N. (2010).
The growing impact of open access distance education
journals – a bibliometric analysis. Journal of Distance
Education, 24(3)
– Analysis of Google citations for 12 Distance Education
Journals (using Harzing’s Publish or Perish tool)
– 6 open access, 6 commercially published
– Early results show roughly equal citations/paper, but
recent gains in citations by open access journals

58. http://www.slideshare.net/greg.g/enabling-open-scholarship?from_search=13

59. Who Pays for
Free content?
1. ‘Freemium: free & “pro” versions
1% of users support all the rest
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Advertising: provide a special audience
Cross-Subsidies: free lunch if you buy beer
Zero-Marginal Cost: online music
Labor Exchange: Digg
Gift Economy: $$$ aren’t everything
7. Author Pay
8. Sponsor – ‘Sugar Daddy’
Chris Anderson’s Taxonomy of Free
Wired: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all

60. The Political Economy of Peer Production
Michael Bauwens
• produce use-value through the free cooperation of
producers
• a 'third mode of production' neither for-profit or
public
• NOT exchange value for
a market, but use-value for
a community
www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

61. Prod-Users:
From production to produsage
Axel Bruns 2008
• Users as active participants in production of artifacts:
• Examples:
– Open source movement
– Wikipedia
– Citizen journalism (blogs)
– Immersive worlds
– Distributed creativity - music, video, Flickr

62. MOOC
• The Course may
be free (for
now), the content
(usually) is NOT!

63. OER Practice- Institutional Level

64. OER Policy – National Level

65. Openness is a Spiral of Growth… but
you have to start somewhere

66. Boundless Opportunities for
• Unanticipated consequences
• Challenges of net privacy/presence
• Emergent adaptation by students and
teachers
• Misuse and exploitation

67. Are you Ready to Take the Pledge??
• I pledge that:
– “ I will no longer submit my
work to closed
publications, nor participate
in review or editorial
functions for closed
publications.”

68. • I pledge to devote most of my reviewing and
editing efforts to manuscripts destined for
open access. For other manuscripts, I will
restrict myself to one review by me for each
review obtained for me by an outlet that is
not open access.

69. Open Access Conclusion
• “Open Access is more than a new model
for scholarly publishing, it is the only
ethical move available to scholars who
take their own work seriously enough to
believe its value lies in how well it engages
many publics and not just a few peers.”
• Gideon Burton, Academic Evolution Blog

70. Your comments and questions most
welcomed!
Terry Anderson terrya@athabascau.ca
Homepage:
http://cde.athabascau.ca/faculty/terrya.php
Blog: terrya.edublogs.org
Skype: @terguy