To celebrate International Open Access Week, this month’s researcher profile features Professor Stephen Billett, an open access champion. Stephen is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the School of Education and Professional Studies. He has researched and published extensively on learning through and for work. He is one of Griffith University’s highest contributors to open access publications in Griffith Research Online, enabling access by practitioners, educators, policy makers, students and the public. Stephen’s open publications have been downloaded over 320,000 times, in many different countries.
We asked Stephen about what open access means to him and his advice for researchers just starting out.
In the context of this year’s Open Access Week theme, Community over Commercialisation, what does open access mean to you?
‘…the value to the community was given precedence […] over the provisioning of commercialisation.’
Initially, I was quite sceptical of open access. It was associated with low quality outlets that wanted payment for publication. These were known as vanity presses. That is, those that had little rigour and, ultimately, would be an embarrassment on your CV. However, upon researching in the healthcare field, a different profile and imperative arose. Firstly, the journals offering open access were high tier journals. Secondly, open access was important for healthcare practitioners who would not otherwise have access to journals as they were behind publisher paywalls and institutional subscriptions. So, the value to the community was given precedence in these journals over the provisioning of commercialisation. This value probably extends to a range of areas in which practitioners might benefit from accessing publications, yet to which they are denied due to a lack of accessibility.
Yet, with such a focus brings new responsibilities and requirements for authors to write in ways that are accessible and be extra diligent in what they report and the kind of recommendations they make, because there is now an added responsibility to responsibly inform practitioners. Added here is also the importance of peer-reviewed and robustly edited scientific outputs being as accessible as the unsubstantiated and unfounded publications that swamp social media. This seems to be an important consideration for the contemporary era.
Consequently, what open access should mean is that quality, peer-reviewed and robustly edited publications should be made more broadly accessible.
Image courtesy of Professor Stephen Billett
How has having your research openly available via Griffith Research Online assisted you and your research?
‘…having broader accessibility provides the prospects for quality research to inform public and governmental deliberations and actions…’
Hopefully, the benefits go beyond those accruing to researchers, but rather the impact that greater accessibility can deliver. These impacts include not only informing practitioners, but also their engagement with policy formation and evaluation. Certainly, having broader accessibility provides the prospects for quality research to inform public and governmental deliberations and actions, and in ways that offer a bulwark against mere opinion, speculation and unfounded propositions that shape those discussions. It is perhaps through a more open form of access that other measures of impact will become able to be captured, such as alternative metrics that are already being used.
How does community benefit from your research findings being open?
As indicated above, that broader access provides reach into practitioner and governmental agencies and those who might advocate for particular issues (e.g., community, professional, political groups). This then can lead to engagement outside of the discipline specific and scientific community, which can have important consequences for their projects.
For instance, recently, the key government agency in the United Kingdom that manages and accredits higher education provisions contacted me to present in one of their forums based upon an article published a few years earlier. It is highly unlikely that individuals in that agency, who are public servants rather than academics, would have access to that article through the journal in which it was published, without it being open access. Importantly, that article challenges some key premises of how that organisation undertakes its roles. Engaging such an organisation with an argued case that draws upon evidence brings prospects of challenging those premises, even if the ideas proposed in the article would not be wholly adopted or even acceptable. However, access to that argued case arose through accessibility.
What advice would you give early career researchers in relation to open access?
First and foremost, decisions about where early career researchers should publish should not be founded upon whether the journal is open access or not. However, that might become redundant soon because it seems that most journals are headed towards open access. Instead, the principal consideration is to publish in journals that indicate high levels of field weighted citations. That is, not necessarily the top 10%, as is often suggested, but rather journals in their field that have a track record of attracting citations. These can be identified through sites such as Elsevier’s CiteScore. Secondly, if such journal is offering open access, and is one which sits within the [Read and Publish] agreement, then that should assist targeting the kind of journals to which they might submit.
Read more about developing a publishing strategy, journal metrics and Read and Publish agreements. For further information about open access publishing, contact the Library.
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