Prior to being a full time student, when I was teaching in a public school, I remember being very frustrated with my lack of access to various music research journals. There was no way I could afford subscriptions to the wide variety of journals I now read and downloading one article could cost up to $40! (If you don’t believe me try checking it out yourself!)
While those of us at universities have almost unlimited access to countless online journals, the majority of educators do not. It is somewhat frustrating thinking about all of the great articles that may never get read by people who can’t afford subscriptions or do not have institutional access.
One solution to expanding access to research and scholarly work is the use of open access journals. While the use of open access journals is a contentious and complex issue, it is increasingly getting discussed in public.
This week Harvard faculty are voting on a measure to determine if they should publish their work open access. You can read Robert Darnton’s case for open access online. Some scholars such as Dana Boyd have even called for tenured faculty to boycott locked down academic journals and publish in open access journals instead.
Have you ever wanted to read an article but not had access? Would you read more literature if it were available for free online in open access journals? Should more music education journals be open access?
It will be interesting to see how the academic landscape continues to shift in terms of publishing scholarly work due to digital technology. In the meantime, the debate over whether or not to publish work in open access journals and what role they might play in music education might be a healthy discussion to engage in.
It is understandable that anyone who comes up with an original idea, including educators, deserves to be compensated. They also deserve to hold intellectual property rights on those ideas. However, there are certainly intellectual concepts which should be shared without the issue of profit and copyright. There is little doubt that the world would benefit from the increased exchange of ideas and information.
To answer your question directly, yes, I would definitely read more literature if it were available for free online.
I completely share your frustration. There are also differences between universities in what journals are accessible. Working in a specialized music university does not give me same possibilities as I did when I worked at a larger university. Publishing houses sell their online access in packages, so I do get access to many journals in the field of biology or medicine, but not to all music education journals!
OJS (http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs) is a great system that you can install to your institution and start several open access journals. The problem of course is, that the scientific community still values the journals of big publishing houses over open access journals. And our progress is constantly evaluated by the number of those publications. There really is no difference, but the traditional journals do have the tradition and “brand”. Of course it takes funding to print and publish a journal, but considerably less than it would for universities to publish on their own!
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