No open learning without open access: a portal for open access research into teaching modern languagesJohn Canning, LLAS Centre, University of Southampton and owner of YazikOpen

E-learning symposium, 24-25th January Slide download: http://humbox.ac.uk/4018/

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1. Background (personal)

2. Open Access

3. Technical

4. Lessons learnt

YazikOpen www.yazikopen.org.uk

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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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

Academics do research

Academics (universities)

review research for

free

Academics (universities)

publish research for

free

Commercial publishers

sell research to

universities

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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 Learnin

g (JLTL)• SiSAL 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

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