Monali Ghosh's Posts - Open Access Week2024-03-29T07:41:43ZMonali Ghoshhttp://legacy.openaccessweek.org/profile/MonaliGhoshhttp://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/9727510889?profile=RESIZE_48X48&width=48&height=48&crop=1%3A1http://legacy.openaccessweek.org/profiles/blog/feed?user=1btaq1cq94fu0&xn_auth=noHow does a researcher benefit from Open Access?tag:legacy.openaccessweek.org,2022-02-23:5385115:BlogPost:2950572022-02-23T19:14:03.000ZMonali Ghoshhttp://legacy.openaccessweek.org/profile/MonaliGhosh
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the last two decades, enabling Open Access has become a major objective for funders, universities, and research institutions alike leading to the rapid growth of open access journals and repositories. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">At its simplest OA means free and unrestricted access to research and scholarly output without any or minimal legal implications. Open Access resources are available online free to anyone willing to read it. OA shatters…</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the last two decades, enabling Open Access has become a major objective for funders, universities, and research institutions alike leading to the rapid growth of open access journals and repositories. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">At its simplest OA means free and unrestricted access to research and scholarly output without any or minimal legal implications. Open Access resources are available online free to anyone willing to read it. OA shatters the access barriers associated with scientific publishing. Before diving into the numerous benefits OA offers, let us explore why it matters.</span></p>
<p><b>Why does OA matter?</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Typically publishers own the copyright of the articles or the scholarly outputs published by the faculty members or the researchers in the journals. Neither the institution nor the author can claim ownership of the same. Even if the institution wants to host a copy of the article, they will have to pay a subscription fee for the journal.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">OA helps researchers own the copyright to their work with a CC-BY license and prevents price barriers from restricting research access. Open Access serves the original purpose of scholarly publishing — to disseminate knowledge and to build upon that knowledge.</span></p>
<p><b>Benefits of Open Access </b></p>
<ul>
<li><b>More exposure for your work:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">OA maximizes the research visibility of your article or journal and helps disseminate your articles more quickly and widely. It makes the content available to those who can't access subscription-based content. Research is immediately available without any barriers, and scholars and researchers can build upon this work without any restrictions.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Achieve more Citations:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">An OA article gets 1.6x times more citations when compared to non-OA articles, enabling researchers to maximize research visibility.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Greater Impact:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">OA articles attract 2.5X more Altmetric attention. They attract 1.9X more news mentions and 1.2X more policy mentions.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Wider Collaboration and interdisciplinary engagement:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Open access enables scholars to work on their research collaboratively on a global scale. It helps researchers connect more easily with each other, leading to greater recognition. </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Publishing Cost:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Access publications are usually less expensive to produce and disseminate when compared to traditional publishing models.</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Maintain control:</b> <span style="font-weight: 400;">OA helps researchers own the copyright to their work with a CC-BY license and at the same time ensure people worldwide can access and reuse their research for free.</span></li>
</ul>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><b>Final Thoughts-</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With the advantages of Open Access to scholarly communications being so evident and tangible, there is no denying that it is the future of publishing. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you wish to learn more about the topic, I suggest you read</span> <a href="https://typeset.io/resources/open-access-publishing-ebook/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Typeset</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">'s new Open Access publishing guide that not only covers the basics of Open Access but also answers commonly asked questions on the topic.</span></p>Examining the benefits and barriers for the implementation of Open Educational Resourcestag:legacy.openaccessweek.org,2021-11-12:5385115:BlogPost:2932212021-11-12T14:33:57.000ZMonali Ghoshhttp://legacy.openaccessweek.org/profile/MonaliGhosh
<p style="text-align: left;">With the rapid advancement of digitalization, the future of textbooks is unlikely to be a printed, rigid form. Especially after the havoc Covid-19 created, the world is ready to shift towards an online and digital means of education, and Open Educational Resources are sure to play an important role in this transformation.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">What is an OER? …</h2>
<p style="text-align: left;"></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">With the rapid advancement of digitalization, the future of textbooks is unlikely to be a printed, rigid form. Especially after the havoc Covid-19 created, the world is ready to shift towards an online and digital means of education, and Open Educational Resources are sure to play an important role in this transformation.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">What is an OER? </h2>
<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://en.unesco.org/themes/building-knowledge-societies/oer">UNESCO</a> defines “Open Educational Resources (OER) as teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.” </p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Simply put, any type of educational material available in the public domain can be considered as OER.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">Benefits of OER</h2>
<p style="text-align: left;">According to the <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/7-in-10-students-have-skipped-buying-a-textbook-because-of-its-cost-survey-finds/">Chronicle of Higher Education</a>, 7 in 10 students can’t afford a textbook because it is too expensive. The cost of education and living for students is increasing massively, and it is simply not fair to ask students or their families to choose between paying rent or buying textbooks.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Here are a few reasons why OER is extremely relevant in these times</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>1. Cost-efficient </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Publishers charge hefty amounts for collections that increase every year, prohibiting access to many students. Even though most teaching has gone online, students still lack the freedom to move away from traditional printed resources because resources are licensed for exclusivity, making them difficult or costly to access. OER removes this expensive burden.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>2. Student-Driven</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">OER initiatives are student-driven, and they provide a multimodal approach towards learning. They are a better option to engage students than textbooks and lectures. OERs make the teaching and studying experience more interactive when compared to traditional techniques, offering a better retention rate of new information for students as it fosters a pedagogically sound learning experience.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>3. Swift Circulation</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">OER lets the information disseminate rapidly and more efficiently when compared to traditional forms that take months to be available. The access to learning is expanded across almost every group of students, making sure a broad participation in educational activities.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>4. Ease of Customization</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">OERs can be customized or modified to the classroom's needs at individual levels taking classroom experience to the next level. OER resources can also be integrated with each other, adding more value to the resource. The quality of OER to be remixed, transformed, and built upon gives it an upper hand over the printed resources.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">Barriers to OER and how to overcome them</h2>
<p style="text-align: left;">Regardless of the incentives and benefits that OERs offer, certain barriers still exist, hindering its adoption.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>1. Lack of Awareness</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Although many academics are willing to share their work, they are often hesitant to do this without losing their rights. Several open content licenses have been developed to solve this problem, like the Creative Commons and the GNU Free Documentation Licence. Open licensing provides a way of controlled sharing with some rights reserved to the author.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>2. Perceived lack of quality</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">There is a popular notion that free open educational resources are of poor quality. Traditional, commercial texts are typically assumed to be high quality because they are published (and marketed by) well-known commercial publishers. To solve this issue, colleges and universities can provide faculty with editors and graphic designers who can assist authors in publishing open resources.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>3. Difficulty in accessing</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Creating or locating existing OER can be extremely time-consuming. Adopting OER with a shift from traditional sources can require a lot of effort and time at the initial stage. This is the reason why libraries, administrators, and instructional designers at various institutions are increasingly providing support for faculty members who are willing to use OER in their courses. Institutes are focusing on building and managing <a href="https://typeset.io/resources/benefits-of-an-institutional-repository-for-university-or-academic-libraries/">Institutional Repositories</a> so that OERs can be stored and accessed with ease.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: left;">Final Thoughts</h2>
<p style="text-align: left;">In the long run, OER will enhance the pedagogy and the learning experience. OERs are indeed the future of education. It can overcome the barriers to students' access to educational resources and help in cost-cutting while also allowing the faculty to customize the course according to their requirements.</p>