open access

Definitive answers may prove a long time in coming, but April 2011 will surely go down as a month that posed some large and essential collegiate questions--about the viability of large-scale, high-quality distance education, about the ability of the traditional university to adapt to a changing technological and economic context, and particularly, about how the answers to those first two questions figure into the future of the University of California system.

Flash back to just shy of a year ago:  last May, UC leadership announced an ambitious plan for an online education pilot program that would feature for-credit/towards-degree courses for enrolled undergrads and would, in theory, increase both educational access and system tuition revenues.  The cost to launch the program of 20 to 40 new courses over the next two years was estimated at $5-6 million, and to assuage concerns (naturally heightened by a context of public sector belt-tightening), university officials said they expected the program to be entirely funded by external sources.  In October 2010, the California Legislative Analyst's Office released a report touting distance learning intiatives as the key means of improving access and "increasing efficiency", and UC vice-provost of academic planning and programs Daniel Greenstein (former director of the California Digital Library) endorsed the report as "educational public policy at its best."

Now jump ahead to the eventful first week of April 2011.  At a major college trusteeship conference on the 3rd, UC president Mark Yudof asserted that rather than persisting in a false and ultimately self-defeating "myth" that UC can "cut [its] way to survival", the system would set an example for public universities by commiting to alternate and innovative delivery models largely predicated on distance learning.  Later that week, the UC Newsroom followed up with a triumphant announcement that the Gates- and Hewlett-backed Next Generation Learning Challenges program had pledged nearly $750,000 to support the UC distance learning pilot program. 

But Vice-Provost Greenstein made another, different announcement the same day:  the NGLC grant notwithstanding, securing the external funding that the program required had, in fact, proved difficult--perhaps prohibitively so.  Instead, Greenstein explained, the university will be borrowing at least $2 million to get the project up and running by next January, and in order to repay the borrowed money (which could ultimately run several million dollars higher than the initial $2 million), the online education plan has now been expanded to include additional offerings for students not enrolled in the UC system.  This reversal on the original external funding plan (even if made by necessity) represents, in effect, a doubling down on the initial ambitious commitment to the distance learning program, and the University of California is positioning itself as both a thought leader and the laboratory host to a high stakes experiment.

In the abstract, this is hardly a bad thing, and most commentators seem to agree that incorporating distance learning into education at an elite level is an idea whose time has come.  But the devil is in the details, and the general consensus on need falters at the point of implementation.  The week before Yudof made his pronouncements on e-learning at the Association of Governing Boards conference, online education experts from three public universities cautioned an audience at the Sloan Consortium's annual blended learning conference about the long and tough road to profitability that optimistic distance learning intiatives are likely to face.   The Sloan speakers' warnings have echoed through the academic/educational blogosphere in recent weeks, and it was against that collective conterpoint that the UC leadership made its string of April announcements.

But careful commentators are noting that the arguments made at the blended learning conference (and elsewhere) weren't against implementing distance education programs; rather, they were against regarding those programs as any sort of quick cash silver bullet for budgetary woes.  The argument was pushing the long view and a healthy dose of fiscal patience:  all of the evidence on e-learning suggests that the initial investment in technical infrastructure and course development will significantly outweigh early revenues.  If, as Yudof contended, the university can't hope to cut its way to survival, neither can it hope to tap an easy flowing river of tuition money coursing lazily through cyberspace.

The big questions coming out of the developments of April, then, hinge on implementation.  These questions abound and range from the theoretical (What is lost/gained by leaving the brick and mortar classroom for the web?) to the technical (How will student engagement be facilitated?) and of course, the financial (How will instructor compensation for virtual courses compare with that of traditional teaching?). 

With its significant borrowed outlay, UC is setting itself up to explore these questions as a pioneer in the field of large-scale, high-level field of e-learning, but pioneering is a fraught and high stakes business.  No one wants to see the UC distance learning program follow the failures of NYUonline and U. of Illinois's Global Campus, but as yet, it's not clear how UC leadership plan to ensure the success and sustainability of their program where others have often underperformed and disappointed.

The one thing that is clear is that the University of California will have the stage and that the whole higher ed world will be watching.

Last fall, the Townsend Humanities Lab published a series of posts in this space on issues relating to Open Access and academic e-publishing, and in November of 2010, the Lab hosted a lunch discussion forum on web-based alternatives to the traditional peer review system.  Today, we proudly present a guest blog by Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin Professor and Chair of Hispanic Studies), who provides insight into Oberlin College's decision to commit to Open Access.

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In the fall of 2009, the faculty of Oberlin College unanimously adopted an Open Access resolution. This resolution included a double commitment. First, the faculty pledged to consistently report its scholarly publications to the institution. Second, it committed to make the full text of those publications, particularly peer-reviewed articles, openly accessible to the entire world, through a digital institutional repository.

With this resolution, Oberlin joined a growing number of institutions of higher education in committing itself to open access, following the lead of major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Although the principles of open access are straightforward and the Oberlin faculty agreed from the outset that they are indeed laudable, the unanimous faculty vote was the culmination of a year’s worth of debate and deliberation.

Most everyone agreed from the start that making our scholarly work as widely available as possible, and to do so for free, was a good idea—for three main reasons. First, it is good for scholarship to be openly accessible. The current, for-profit system of dissemination does not work well in that respect. It is also bleeding library budgets everywhere. Second, the internet makes open access easier and cheaper than ever. And third, Open Access will make it easier for Oberlin College to showcase to the outside world, but also to itself, its intellectual and scholarly engagement and productivity.

The challenge was to go from principle to practice. How do you translate a laudable goal into the messy and diverse world of scholarly publishing across fields, divisions, and generations? The discussion quickly ran into a host of complicating factors, of which I’ll mention three.

A first issue had to do with the way that faculty conceive of their relationship to their institution. As it turns out, we tend not to see ourselves as employees of a college or university; we are affiliated with it. We do our teaching for the institution, but we hold a much more diverse set of assumptions about the relationship between our institution and the scholarship that we produce. Sure, we tend add our affiliation to our byline; but we don’t see our scholarship as originating in, much less belonging to our college or university.

A second complicating factor was faculty’s relationship to journals, publishers, scholarly associations, and funding sources. Depending on their field, the way in which faculty conceive of their relationship to the other major players in the field of scholarly publication differs widely. Scholars may feel beholden to funders, to publishers, to scholarly associations that publish journals.

A third point of contention was related to career pressures: faculty fear of rocking the boat, missing out, disqualifying themselves. For most faculty, publishing is both absolutely vital and seen as somewhat precarious.  

Oberlin’s Library Committee, which took on the challenge of shepherding Open Access to a faculty vote, decided for a gradual, step-by-step approach that would provide ample opportunity for questions, feedback and discussion. This included, crucially, educating our colleagues about their rights as authors and the ease with which they generally give up many of their rights. We further organized workshops with invited speakers, and held separate discussions within the College, Conservatory, and academic divisions and departments. In addition to educating the faculty about the severe problems associated with the current system of scholarly publishing, these sessions served to dispel fears and misinformation. Some faculty were surprised to hear that a large number of journals do in fact allow for some form of author archiving. Others were relieved to hear that a mere inquiry from academic authors about a publisher’s policy on institutional repositories has never yet resulted in a penalization of the author. Of indispensable help in all these discussions was Ray English, Oberlin’s Director of Libraries, who has long been a national advocate for Open Access.

The discussions also served to make up our collective mind on the policy’s actual nature and scope. In the end, Oberlin’s Open Access Policy was largely modeled on Harvard’s. Like Harvard’s, ours is an opt-out policy: all faculty and staff make their scholarship accessible as a matter of course, while anyone can request an exemption at any time, for any publication, for any reason—provided they first report their publication’s metadata. In other words, even if the repository does not end up containing everyone’s work in full-text, it will still reflect the full range of Oberlin’s scholarly productivity. Unlike Harvard’s, moreover, Oberlin’s policy also covers chapters in collected volumes—an important publishing format for many humanists and social scientists.

Since the policy was adopted, library staff have been working on the set-up of the actual repository, modeling it on Harvard’s exemplary DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard). Once the repository is in place, it will probably take a while for the faculty to get in the habit of reporting and submitting their publications; to help things along, the administration is devising a way to fold Open Access into the faculty’s regular reporting for purposes of promotion and salary review. The library has also committed to populating the repository with Oberlin scholarship published before the resolution was adopted. The office of Communications, meanwhile, is eagerly awaiting the moment when it can mine the repository for its purposes—showing the world that Oberlin is a vibrant intellectual community of engaging scholar-teachers who are not afraid to share their work with a global public.



 

There has been no shortage of posts in this space devoted to discussions of open access educational resources and the possible future(s) of web-based academic publishing and research.  A recent study detailed in a paper appearing in this month's Journal of Electronic Publishing peers into that digital future and finds..."academic search engine spam"--a neologism that is strange, funny, and just may be portentous.

Authors Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp have been studying Google Scholar's ranking algorithm for some time, and the duo published an article earlier this year investigating the possibilities of what they called "academic search engine optimization" (ASEO).  In that paper (which is also well-worth reading), they advised scholars on “[...] the creation, publication, and modification of scholarly literature in a way that makes it easier for academic search engines to both crawl it and index it.”  Not surprisingly, the paper and the very idea of ASEO sparked a controversy in the academic community.

In the opening of their new article, Beel and Gipp note that the ASEO study elicited a varied response, and the new study promises to do likewise.  The authors followed up on the guidelines they laid out in the ASEO paper to test the degree to which the ranked results of academic search engines (primarily focusing on Google Scholar) can be manipulated through altered citation counts, keyword padding, and the inclusion of invisible text within academic papers.  And in what has to be a first in academic research, they even manage to get Google Scholar to link to a doctored version of a research paper containing an ad for Viagra.

Accordingly, Beel and Gipp find that academic search engines can be gamed and that it isn't even terribly difficult to do so.  The threat, in other words, is real, and in their concluding discussion, the authors recommend that Google Scholar and other engines "should apply at least the common spam detection techniques known from Web spam detection, analyze text for sense-making, and not count all citations."  More provocatively, they aver that "the potential benefits of academic search engine spam might be too tempting for some researchers."  In a paper likely to spark considerable discussion, that's the sentence that will provide the most tender.

Interestingly, Beel and Gipp are at work on their own, hopefully robust academic search engine, Sciplore. And in case you were wondering: this author can confirm that all of the keywords for the pair's recent article are indeed legit.