Combined post on ALT’s decision to make its journal open access and a collection of academic publishing links I’ve been meaning to share for a while!
ALT’s Open Access Journal
Earlier this year Research in Learning Technology, the journal of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) switched to open access. I’m a Trustee of ALT and I’ve written a blog post on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog about why ALT made the switch: By freeing our journal from the ghetto of academic library subscriptions we will foster discussion and impact.
Academic Magazines
It’s been a very long time since I blogged here – over half a year (the shame!). I’ve been meaning to write a post around a bunch of links I’d been gathering since January 2011!
The initial article from a year ago was An academic angle on issues in a periodical for the people in the Times Higher Education which featured The Public Intellectual and started:
Between peer-reviewed journals and popular journalism lies a gap in which “the new knowledge, valuable critical insight, and fresh perspectives that academia produces” can be brought from behind pay walls to the wider readership it deserves.
Since then I’ve come across a few other similar formats / approaches.
- The Public Intellectual
Article types include: ‘think again’, ‘first person’ and ‘policy riffs’. - The Conversation
Australian, describes itself as “independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector” - Social Europe Journal
Publishing since 2005. A journal but shorter 500-700 word posts. - Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal
Longer more journal-like format, including interviews, opinion pieces as well as longer features
- Social Science Space
Run by SAGE Publishing, see Topics menu for blog posts. - Politics in Spires
Oxbridge collaboration - LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences
Posts on maximising the impact of academic work in the social sciences and other disciplines
The similarities, seem to be:
- Blog format but not necessarily recognisable or described as a blog
- Authors mainly working in academia
- Multi-author (& beyond a single institution)
- Reviewing by editorial team
- WordPress as the publishing platform
Disappointingly most are not licenced under creative commons with notable exceptions of ALT’s Journal, LSE Impact Oxbridge blogs.
As I’ve now switched from the world of Social Sciences to that of Computing, Information Science, Engineering & Maths, I’ll be on the lookout for more examples in that area.
If you’ve any examples of any kind please feel do add them below.
OMICS GROUP INCORPORATION
Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available online to the reader “without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Subsidized journals are financed by an academic institution, learned society or a government information center; those requiring payment are typically financed by money made available to researchers for the purpose from a public or private funding agency, as part of a research grant. There have also been several modifications of open access journals that have considerably different natures: hybrid open access journals and delayed open access journals.
Open access journals (sometimes called the “gold road to open access”) are one of the two general methods for providing open access. The other one (sometimes called the “green road”) is self-archiving in a repository. The publisher of an open access journal is known as an “open access publisher”, and the process, “open access publishing”.