Supporters of open academic content have long touted its ability to widen the impact and productivity of scholarship while relieving cost pressures in academia. While the development of open access (OA) publishing and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been labelled a disruption to publishing and the academic community, a new study published in SAGE Open finds that OA has a more tempered impact on scholarship while the impact of MOOCs on teaching is more severe.
SAGE Open is an award-winning, peer-reviewed, 'Gold' open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.
Researcher Richard Wellen found that while OA advocates' arguments are based on principled commitment to openness for the academic community, current advances in OA publishing are driven by a strategic commitment to maximise research productivity, which ultimately tempers its ability to disrupt academic output.
Wellen went on to examine how “gold” and "green" OA models and OA mega journals impact the costs of research and may prompt changes in scholarly communication that challenge the long-held desire to be published in a prestigious journal.
Through his analysis, Wellen concluded that OA mega journals are an innovative way to address costly review cycles and streamline hierarchical publishing options while maintaining quality in research. Still, he found that they are not likely to fully replace upper-tier research journals because the research community perceives these journals as a tool to identify new important research.
Wellen found that MOOCs conversely, have had more of a disruptive impact on the academic community, in part because they define higher education institutions as a barrier to improved productivity and because the content designed for MOOCs has been found to be standardised, homogenised, and safe in order to lower costs and heighten automation.
Wellen has also discussed the broader implications of the development of open academic content. The full article "Open Access, Megajournals, and MOOCs: On the Political Economy of Academic Unbundling" in SAGE Open is here.
