Making quality accessible with OA and OJS

In the July 2008 issue of School Libraries Worldwide, University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies professor Rick Kopak outlines the benefits of Open Access (OA) and Open Journal Systems (OJS) in his article, “Open Access and Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over.”

As teachers and TLs, we know that students achieving a certain competence in their information or digital literacy levels is essential (see this post). We also know—perhaps through our own first-hand experience or through seeing our students’ struggles—that the Web exists as a collection of information so vast that it is quite easy to become lost, overwhelmed, and confused when sifting through the web of information. As we search for information relevant to a project or a paper, we often feel much like Ray Bradbury’s protagonist Guy Montag in Part 2 of his novel Farhenheit 451. As Montag struggles to decipher for himself what is real and what is controlled or contrived, how to literally and figuratively read both books and the immediate world around him, Bradbury employs a metaphor to illustrate Montag’s futile efforts: information passes swiftly and profusely through Montag’s mind just as sand falls through a sieve. Our students’ experiences on the web are often much like that: information filters through the sieve of their minds like so much detritus with only a small portion of the content remaining in the sieve. What remains in the sieve is—unfortunately—too often information that is not necessarily marked by quality, credibility, or accuracy, but that for some other reason was “big enough” to remain left in the sieve. What too often determines this “bigness”—what is left over—are factors like ease of accessibility (the first hit on Google) and information that is comprehensible to the lowest common denominator. Kopak remarks on this conundrum by noting, “The increasing availability of information via the Web brings much of good quality, but also much of less discernible authority, trustworthiness, and provenance.” In the effort to increase the quality of the information that students encounter and use in their learning, OA and OJS offer themselves as helpful tools.

OA and OJS are useful because they offer greater ease in accessing “the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article” (Kopak). Essentially, OA and OJS make more immediately searchable and available quality articles from reliable journals that were formerly available only in their original paper versions or via databases such as EBSCO, which are fee-required sources for information (often times schools or school districts do pay for access to such databases, but my personal experience has shown me that often times students do not bother using the services at school or in their password-protected forms at home. This is likely an issue that is teachable with an increased focus on information literacy by TLs and teachers in general). This accessibility is important, as locating and using quality information is the first step in most projects and papers; if this first step itself is cumbersome or confusing, then the chances for success in general dramatically decrease.

As I note on another blog, this

is not to say that OJS are a panacea with the effect of teachers no longer needing to teach digital literacy to students. OJS are, however, powerful tools that enable students to have a first place to look—at least one de facto "wise choice" that can be made before diving into the information sea—or crawling upon that information web?—that is Google.

And experience tells me that the more tools the better.

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