Open Access to Open Educational Resources

While watching the webcast "Connecting the Dots between Open Access and Open Educational Resources," I noticed something interesting: the graph that represented the cost of college textbooks for students versus the rate of inflation looked almost identical to a graph that I saw 3 years ago at a presentation on the rising costs of periodical subscriptions.  Both graphs represent staggering rises in the cost to students and libraries for materials that rarely make the college professors and researchers who create them much money.

While libraries have been decrying the crisis in scholarly communication for years, and shrinking their book budgets to accommodate the bigger piece of the pie that periodicals are gobbling up, many students, according to webcast presenter and student Nicole Allen, seem to have adopted a different strategy: simply not buying their textbooks.

I don't think we should underestimate the undue burden that is placed on students by the onerous cost of textbooks (if you've never had a student at the reference desk in tears about how much she has to shell out for her biology textbook, consider yourself lucky).  Even if they've scraped together the loans to pay for tuition, it's sometimes that $200 economics textbook that means the difference between making rent and dropping a class.  The cost of materials should never be the deciding factor for a student's intellectual development, and the way that we, as librarians and scholars, can mitigate that potentiality is to pay a little more attention (or a lot more attention) to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that has been gaining traction in recent years.

The infrastructure for vetting instructional material is not as well developed for OER as it is for traditional textbooks, and this presents a barrier to widespread adoption of OER by instructors.  Most professors know the publishers that are well-respected in their field, they've seen the same names on articles and monographs since they were undergraduates, and using this information, they can make a quick choice of high quality course material from amongst traditional sources while they're in the midst of determining all of the other crucial elements of their course.  Getting newly acquainted with platforms for OER, looking through all new textbooks, and evaluating their quality is a lot to ask of busy instructors.

But vetting material is what librarians are all about, and I think that marriage of student need and instructor/librarian expertise is the making of a truly useful collaboration.  Just as we do for our normal collection, we can begin to look at the OER that are out there for our subject areas and create curated lists to present at our next faculty meeting.  Both webcasters suggested a great list of places to find OER, and two of my favorites are:

• Washington State's Open Course Library- a project that took the highest enrollment courses in the state and asked professors and librarians who worked with those classes to design free or very low cost materials--including syllabi, textbooks, and assessment--to be shared under a Creative Commons license (CC BY).
• Open Courseware Consortium- acts as a clearinghouse of OER material from the likes of Tufts, MIT, and the University of Michigan to be used by educators around the world (I like to look at the MIT literature courses just to see which authors are being taught these days).

A few libraries have begun to take active roles in promoting OER at their institutions--UMASS Amherst, for instance, has begun distributing grants to instructors to support their efforts to adopt OER in their courses--but according to webcast presenter Cable Green, most libraries have focused their intellectual and political energies on the Open Access movement and spent very little time looking at OER. 

The first step that I've decided on for myself is to head over to the campus bookstore to see just how much students are actually shelling out for course materials in my departments.  If it turns out that the cost is burdensome, I am going to take a look at some of those courses and see if I can match them up with some of the peer-reviewed OER that I find online.  Armed with that information, I think I could make a good case to the instructors in my liaison areas to consider alternative texts, and maybe save their students some serious money in the next few quarters.

Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.