Transcript Main presentation title goes here.

No open learning without open
access: a portal for open access
research into teaching modern
languages
John Canning, LLAS Centre, University of
Southampton and owner of YazikOpen
E-learning symposium, 24-25th January
YazikOpen www.yazikopen.org.uk
1. Background (personal)
2. Open Access
3. Technical
4. Lessons learnt
2
Background
• Personal: LLAS subject centre. Went down to 4 days a week
and wanted to learn more skills
• Open access: Cross that my research is for public sale at
c.$25 for 15 page article.
• Lots of talk about MOOCs, OER, but what use if courses
and teaching material, but research is not?
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4
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Open access
• International movement
– Free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text
of research articles for everyone, anywhere in the world.
• Gold
– Author pays funding
• Green
– Self-archiving of closed access work.
• Diamond
– Free to read, free to publish
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Who makes the money from journals?
Taxpayer funds
university to
pay academics
to do research
Commercial
publishers sell
research to
universities
Academics
(universities)
publish
research for free
Academics do
research
Academics
(universities)
review research
for free
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Finch report
• Favoured Gold Open Access (authors pays)
– Fees sometimes £1000+
– Problem for those without grants, poorer institutions ,
independent scholars.
– ‘Solution’ to give more money to universities so
publishers still make profits.
– Many low quality and/or ‘predatory’ journals.
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YazikOpen.org.uk
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• Funding= £0
• Part time ‘private project’.
• Built in Drupal (www.drupal.org). Open source software +
contributing modules, notably biblio)
• Hosting by clook.net
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Issues
• Needed to learn Drupal
• Online support: drupal.org and other sites
• Drupal for Dummies book.
• Several false starts
– Memory required
– Did not always understand documentation with modules
– Sometimes no documentation.
– First host company I used very poor.
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Other issues
• Time issues
– Keeping content up to date
– Occasional newsletters
– Twitter/ Facebook accounts
– Content in suitable formats
• Financial
• Community participation
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Other issues (2)
• Keeping version up to date (security)
• Multifaceted role
– Web developer (technical, design and security)
– Cataloguer
– Social media
– Financier
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Selected open access language teaching
journals
• Journal of Second Language Teaching & Research
• Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics
• English Language Teaching
• The Journal of Language Teaching and Learning
(JLTL)
• SiSAL Journal: Studies in Self-Access Learning
• Reading in a Foreign Language
• German as a Foreign Language
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Future… ?
• Sustainability: getting community involvement
– Adding material
– Comments
– Keywording
• Financial sustainability
• Buy-in from publishers of open access journals
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