No open learning without open access a portal

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 Yazik. Open E-learning symposium, 24 -25 th January

Yazik. Open 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? 3

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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 6

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 7

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. 8

Yazik. Open. org. uk 9

• Funding= £ 0 • Part time ‘private project’. • Built in Drupal (www. drupal. org). Open source software + contributing modules, notably biblio) • Hosting by clook. net 10

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. 11

Other issues • Time issues – Keeping content up to date – Occasional newsletters – Twitter/ Facebook accounts – Content in suitable formats • Financial • Community participation 12

Other issues (2) • Keeping version up to date (security) • Multifaceted role – Web developer (technical, design and security) – Cataloguer – Social media – Financier 13

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) • Si. SAL Journal: Studies in Self-Access Learning • Reading in a Foreign Language • German as a Foreign Language 14

Future… ? • Sustainability: getting community involvement – Adding material – Comments – Keywording • Financial sustainability • Buy-in from publishers of open access journals 15