A few thoughts on “Open Access” Journals

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2011-02-03_13-43-08_003“Open Access” journals are all the rage these days. The idea which, on the surface is a worthy one, is that readers get access to the papers for free. Instead of making money via subscriptions, these journals get their money by charging the authors. Now, many people seem to think that’s just fine. Mostly, they are academics who have grant money or some other means for paying the fees. For them, it’s just part of the job.

As a result, they don’t think about the real implications of this turn around:

When readers pay, the content must be something they want to read (i.e. it has to be worth paying for).

When authors pay, it doesn’t matter whether the content is any good or not.

I’ve seen fees of up to £6,000. For a paper. I don’t have a grant. If I want to publish in one of these journals, I have to pay out of my own pocket. I’m not about to do that. That means people like me can’t publish in these journals. Our voices won’t be heard. But that isn’t the only problem. THIS is the much more serious problem, because it has implications for the entire future of research:

To authors who cannot afford a full payment of the fee, we may offer partial or total fee waivers on the sole condition that the papers they submit be of high quality. Article Processing Charges for Low and Lower Middle Income Countries are calculated according to the SCIRP Global Participation Initiative.

So, if you HAVE the money, the article DOESN’T have to be of high quality?!

That is something that’s going to happen more and more.

Not only that, unfunded researchers have no way to get their works published. Yes, yes I know that anyone can publish stuff on a blog. But whether we like it or not, credentials still matter (as they should). Reputation matters. Still. Publishing in a respected venue says something about the author.

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The Convincing Case for Sending Your Kids Outside to Play Alone | Inhabitots

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The Convincing Case for Sending Your Kids Outside to Play Alone | Inhabitots.

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YES!!!!

A recent story in The New York Times discussed how play has all but vanished from childhood. The article states, “Too little playtime may seem to rank far down on the list of society’s worries, but the scientists, psychologists, educators and others who are part of the play movement say that most of the social and intellectual skills one needs to succeed in life and work are first developed through childhood play.” A great deal of research proves that The New York Times piece is right on. Kids are exposed to some serious problems if they don’t get a healthy dose of free, unstructured play.

  • The American Academy of Pediatrics says that a lack of unstructured playtime causes depression and anxiety in children.
  • A Stanford School of Medicine study says that kids who miss out on free, unsupervised play also miss out on cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development and well-being as well as self-regulation, empathy, and group management skills.
  • Research at the Morton Arboretum notes that symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are worse when children have no contact with nature. This research showed that kids with ADHD who do spend time in nature concentrate, complete tasks, and follow directions better than their peers.
  • Children with nothing but screentime have no idea how to manage when screens aren’t available. They get depressed, lose control and have no clue how to entertain themselves. Most kids use the term “Addiction” when describing their screen time, which is a serious problem. In fact this is a con for parents too. Incredibly, there are whole articles dedicated to advising parents how to teach kids to play alone! Seriously?
  • A lack of outside play time is linked to stress, vitamin D deficiency and decreased disease resistance in kids.
  • Kids who don’t experience free play miss out on memory growth, problem solving skills, language skills, literacy skills, math proficiency and much more.
  • Most health organizations directly link the growing childhood obesity crisis to a lack of independent outdoor play. It’s scary to imagine, but the Alliance for Childhood, a play advocacy group, notes that children ages 10 to 16 now spend just 12.6 minutes per day in vigorous physical activity and an average of 10.4 waking hours each day relatively motionless. We’re talking about a generation of kids who are living their entire childhood sedentary, an issue that is directly linked to obesity and many other health problems.

  • Kids who don’t get to be outside will not care as much about protecting the planet once they become adults. One study notes that the most direct route to caring for the environment is participating in “wild nature activities” before the age of 11. (Wells and Lekies, 2006).

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The new enclosure movement | Harold Jarche

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The new enclosure movement | Harold Jarche.

I’m really quite conflicted about this. On the one hand I believe we should share our skills and knowledge so others can benefit. I think this is especially true for academics, who benefit from public funds. This is true even in private universities, and even when funded by private companies because they all get grants and tax breaks. Directly or indirectly, a great deal of the research done in academic institutions is funded by the taxpayer. Therefor, they should share when they learn with the people who paid for it.

On the other hand, I am not currently employed by any university. Should I still share my research? My leaning is to  say yes, but I still have bills to pay like everyone else, so now what?

There’s also that central piece there in the image: trust.

When it comes to instructional design and teaching, I have had quite a few innovative ideas. I have made illustrations and examples that took many, many hours to create. Over the years I have put a LOT of my ideas out there. Then people started taking my ideas without crediting the source. I don’t mind sharing my ideas, really I don’t…. but I HATE people who take my ideas without giving me credit for having had them…. and I especially hate it when people start to pass my ideas off as their own.

So now I watermark my pictures (I have literally 1000’s of pictures on our farm website). I put copyright notices on everything. I fully realize that this does not stop people from stealing, but at least it’s something.

I used to teach a data architecture course, and I had a great many notes and examples. They used to be publicly available, but then other instructors started using my stuff without asking or crediting me. Along with the usual thefts from places like China and India, I was getting regular requests for assignment solutions. What pushed it over the edge was when other people in my own department started using my stuff without asking.

In the last year I’ve started playing around with gamification in one of the courses I teach (correction: TAUGHT). I’ve been looking around, and there are precious few Education courses that deviate from the standard: read these papers; discuss them; do an assignment or two; write a paper. Everything has a rubric (whether it makes sense to have one or not), and everything is marked that way it’s always been marked. Mine is different (more on that in subsequent posts).

I DID have the whole course publicly available (except for student work of course). I don’t anymore. The problem? TRUST. I know people who would take my ideas and “forget” to mention where they came from. Sad, but true.

What’s the solution? If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to share!

 

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Gamasutra: Adrian Chmielarz’s Blog – You Have an Idea for a Game – Here’s Why Nobody Cares

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http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdrianChmielarz/20130509/191987/You_Have_an_Idea_for_a_Game__Heres_Why_Nobody_Cares.php

Gamasutra: Adrian Chmielarz’s Blog – You Have an Idea for a Game – Here’s Why Nobody Cares
The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company. Want to write your own blog post on Gamasutra? It’s easy!
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New Report on the value of Game-based Learning

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New Report on the value of Game-based Learning

Game-based learning: latest evidence and future directions
The role of video games in teaching and learning is a source of debate among many educators, researchers and in the popular press. Detractors and advocates have been discussing the influences and the …
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How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education

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How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education.

Many of these apply to papers submitted for publication, generally. I have lost track of how many game papers I have reviewed where the authors had an idea, did what appeared to be a quickie Google search in their own discipline, and concluded that their idea was NEW! This seems to be ESPECIALLY true in Education.

  1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography.
  2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references.
  3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
  4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks.
  5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida.
  6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago.
  7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script.
  8. Make the topic of the thesis too large.
  9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis.
  10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion.

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Gender Bias Found in How Graduate Students Review Scientific Studies | Computing Education Blog

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Gender Bias Found in How Graduate Studen2013-02-19 @11-36-04ts Review Scientific Studies | Computing Education Blog.

Looks like we still have a ways to go….

From Mark Guzdial’s Blog:

We’ve heard stories like this before, about the implicit bias in how STEM professionals are judged.  This one is striking because the participants are graduate students, not established researchers who reflect years of experience in the community.  These are the new researchers, and they’re already biased.

The research found that graduate students in communication — both men and women — showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names like “Brenda Collins” or “Melissa Jordan.”

These students gave higher ratings to the exact same abstracts when the authors were identified with male names like “Andrew Stone” or “Matthew Webb.”

In addition, the results suggested that some research topics were seen as more appropriate for women scholars — such as parenting and body image — while others, like politics, were viewed as more appropriate for men.

These findings suggest that women may still have a more difficult time than men succeeding in academic science, said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” Knobloch-Westerwick said.

 

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For all those who think the country life is simple,… or easy.

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For all those who think the country life is simple,… or easy.

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