{"id":703,"date":"2013-10-22T16:52:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T16:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/?p=703"},"modified":"2013-11-13T17:30:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T17:30:02","slug":"green-gold-and-exploding-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/archives\/703","title":{"rendered":"Green, gold and exploding books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dr
Dr Ann Grand, The Open University<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Martin Hall<\/a>, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, came to the OU today to talk about the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing. This was part of Open Access Week<\/a> at the OU.<\/p>\n

The green and gold swamp of confusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

The mire of confusion around the green and gold<\/a> models of open access \u2013 and which is \u2018best\u2019 \u2013 \u00a0is trampled by many feet. Too long to rehearse here, I\u2019d suggest a quick definition is that in \u2018\u2019gold\u2019, the author pays to publish their work in an open access journal, and it is then instantly openly available. This raises the question of who pays the charges, of course. \u2018Green\u2019 open access relies on authors themselves archiving, in publicly-available repositories (such as the Open University\u2019s ORO<\/a>) a pre-publication version of work that they have published elsewhere.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Institutional repositories are increasingly important and there is some evidence<\/a> that making work openly available, whether in a repository or an open access journal, increases the number of citations. Citations are important in the academic world; it stands to reason \u2013 if an article we want is hidden behind a paywall, we\u2019re likely to turn away and look for another one.<\/p>\n

In the long run, Martin suggested, the subscription model for publishing is unlikely to survive, comparing it to the film industry coping with the challenge of video and DVD \u2013 a complex and expensive transition.<\/p>\n

\"Open
The Open Access logo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The copy of record<\/em><\/p>\n

The academic model is built on cumulative development and understanding and the anchor for this progressive knowledge system is the \u2018copy of record\u2019; the final, published, version. This poses problems for green open access, as publisher\u2019s will often only allow authors to deposit the pre-publication version, not the published version, which means critical changes may not be reflected.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Too much information<\/em><\/p>\n

Once, academics were trained to cope with scarcity \u2013 how to winkle information from a small number of publications. Now, we face an abundance of information, so that information literacy, sifting and filtering, learning how to separate the good stuff from the bad becomes key.<\/p>\n

Digital degradation<\/em><\/p>\n

We can read manuscripts written in the fourteenth century; we have lost data from projects conducted in the 1980s because it\u2019s held on floppy discs that we just can\u2019t read now. Creating and curating data so that we can keep reading it has to be sorted out; allied to this is the problem of the many and varied routes for digital archiving (dropbox, slideshare, scribd \u2026 add method of choice here).<\/p>\n

The Enlightenment settlement<\/em><\/p>\n

Academics are used to the organisational settlement into disciplines \u2013 which Martin suggested dates from the foundation of the learned societies. We defend the boundaries of our discipline against interlopers, using disciplinary language and codes to repel boarders and construct tacit knowledge. However, the big questions can no longer be solved by single disciplines \u2013 tackling the problem of climate change brings in environmental science, politics, economics \u2026 The big questions offer exciting new challenges for universities but will be unanswerable without truly open data and the development of ways to deal with huge<\/em> quantities of data \u2013 the semantic web, data mining, automated searching, strong metadata standards for both digital and analogue information.<\/p>\n

The exploding book<\/strong><\/p>\n

Martin suggested the traditional publishing model \u2013 the book \u2013 is broken. This is vitally important for the social sciences and humanities, where the scholarly monograph is a crucial currency. Ebooks are likely to become increasingly important: they can be created relatively easily, they offer extras \u2013 the ability to highlight and save data, push information to social media, embed urls and links to data sources \u2013 in short, the book is exploding. Books will become portals that connect scholarship to its data, which will change the way we make claims, scrutinise and verify research.<\/p>\n

Continuities<\/strong><\/p>\n

Students are learning in different ways, Martin suggested, requiring expert assistance to understand \u00a0how to assemble meaning from a wide range of sources, flexible content and constructed social spaces. However, the university is not about to die; MOOCs have not sounded the death knell. The book, in its day, was a revolutionary technology for distributing knowledge. Academia is revolutionary and deeply traditional at the same time; academics continue to give away intellectual property in return for reputational capital. Open access has always been the key to this bargain; it\u2019s just that the technology has changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Salford, came to the OU today to talk about the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing. This was part of Open Access Week at the OU. The green and gold swamp of confusion The mire of confusion around the green and gold models of open access \u2013 ...continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,17,28,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1129,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions\/1129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weblab.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/per\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}