Open access, megajournals, and MOOCs: On the political economy of academic unbundling
| Published | October 2013 |
| Journal | SAGE Open Volume 3, Issue 4, Pages 1-16 |
ABSTRACT
The development of “open” academic content has been strongly embraced and promoted by many advocates, analysts, stakeholders, and reformers in the sector of higher education and academic publishing. The two most well-known developments are open access scholarly publishing and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), each of which are connected to disruptive innovations enabled by new technologies. Support for these new modes of exchanging knowledge is linked to the expectation that they will promote a number of public interest benefits, including widening the impact, productivity, and format of academic work; reforming higher education and scholarly publishing markets; and relieving some of the cost pressures in academia. This article examines the rapid emergence of policy initiatives in the United Kingdom and the United States to promote open content and to bring about a new relationship between the market and the academic commons. In doing so, I examine controversial forms of academic unbundling such as open access megajournals and MOOCs and place each in the context of the heightened emphasis on productivity and impact in new regulatory regimes in the area of higher education.| Keywords | academic productivity · megajournals · · open access · scholarly publishing |
| Refereed | Yes |
| Rights | by/3.0/deed.en_GB |
| DOI | 10.1177/2158244013507271 |
| URL | http://sgo.sagepub.com/content/3/4/2158244013507271.article-info |
| Other information | SAGE Open |
| Export options | BibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar |
AVAILABLE FILES
Viewed by 251 distinct readers
CLOUD COMMUNITY REVIEWS
The evaluations below represent the judgements of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cloud editors.
Click a star to be the first to rate this document
▶ POST A COMMENT
SIMILAR RECORDS
Open access scholarly publications as OER
Anderson, Terry; McGreal, Rory; Conrad, Dianne
This article presents the rationale, common practices, challenges, and some personal anecdotes from a journal editor on the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles as open educational resources ...
Match: open access
Faculty and student perspectives toward Open Courseware, and open access publishing: Some comparisons between European and North American populations
Hardin, Joseph; Cañero, Aristóteles
Instructor and student beliefs, attitudes and intentions toward contributing to local open courseware (OCW) sites have been investigated through campus-wide surveys at Universidad Politecnica de Valencia and the ...
Match: open access
PubMed Central Canada: Beyond an open access repository?
Nariani, Rajiv; Kaspar, Wendi Arant; vanDuinkerken, Wyoma
PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) represents a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the National Research Council's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information ...
Match: open access
Why OA: Open Access
Amiel, Tel
Open access (OA) promotes the fair and ethical sharing of scientific knowledge as a global public resource, in accordance with the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021). It is intended to make research outputs ...
Match: open access
Open access in China and its effect on academic libraries
Hu, Dehua; Luo, Aijing; Liu, Haixia; Kasper, Wendi Arant; vanDuinkerken, Wyoma
OA is to become the future of academic library exchanges in China. With the government's support and promotion of OA, more and more Chinese academic libraries have been committed to participating in OA. The rapid ...
Match: open access
OpenER, a Dutch initiative in Open Educational Resources
Schuwer, Robert; Mulder, Fred
Over the period 2006–2008, the Dutch Open Universiteit Nederland conducted an experiment in which Open Educational Resources (OER) were offered in an effort to bridge the gap between informal and formal learning and ...
Match: open access
Institutional repositories, open access, and scholarly communication: A study of conflicting paradigms
Cullen, Rowena; Chawner, Brenda
The Open Access movement of the past decade, and institutional repositories developed by universities and academic libraries as a part of that movement, have openly challenged the traditional scholarly communication ...
Match: open access
Researchers outside APC- financed open access: Implications for scholars without a paying institution
Burchardt, Jørgen
The article processing charge (APC) financed Open Access is a publication model that provides immediate and free access to scientific articles. More than half of the world’s Open Access articles are published ...
Match: open access
Are open educational resources the future of e-learning?
Kozinska, K.; Kursun, Engin; Wilson, Tina; McAndrew, Patrick; et al.
Increased interest in more open approaches to learning, in particular Open Educational Resources is reflected in the programmes of international organisations, national initiatives and the actions of individual ...
Match: open access
Fifty shades of open
Pomerantz, Jeffrey; Peek, Robin
Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so ...
Match: open access









