Introduction – Focus Group Study
Open Access Journals – Perceptions and Concerns
September 24, 2011
I hope you are having a good day. Thank you for coming here today and taking the time to join our discussion of open access journals (OAJ) and open content (OC). My name is Alfonso Sintjago and I am a current graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I am hoping to better understand the concerns of graduate students regarding Open Access Journals and the role graduate students feel they play in society, in the future of academia and their own research.
As society becomes increasingly interconnected through the increased use of modern information communication technologies (ICT) and the cost of access to journals increases for universities and individuals, various educational organizations, researchers, and publishing companies have taken the initiative and changed their revenue model to increase access to society at large (to anyone with internet access). They decided to publish in and promote Open Access Journals and move away from the traditional toll access model where individuals and subscribers had to pay to access these resources. The transformation of the economic model was envisioned as a way to increase access, improve the quality of research, improve transparency, and reduce the costs for institutions to have access to these different journals and journal repositories.
Currently there are two primary economic models for Open Access Journals. While most of the smaller Open Access Journals are supported by grants or university programs, some of the larger ones are funded either by grant agencies, or the researchers themselves. Accounting for a significant but smaller fraction of academic journals, some universities have moved towards funding or paying the fees requested by some Open Access Journals for journal articles to be edited and published. Despite the best intentions of many organizations, editing is a time consuming and complicated task, and Open Access Journal publishers require these funds to pay their full time employees (if they do not rely on volunteers). While the Open Access Movement (OAM) hopes to transform academic publishing so that anyone in the world can access and contribute to the creation of knowledge, various questions remain to be addressed.
During this focus group we hope to learn more about your opinions on this subject. A large number of arguments for and against Open Access Journals have been presented previously in numerous studies. Yet these focus groups hope to obtain a better understanding of the concerns and opinions of UMN graduate students within the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). You have been given an anonymous user name so that you can freely express your opinion. The preliminary findings of these focus groups will be presented during UMN Open Access Week, Oct 28, 2011 (z.umn.edu/openaccess2011). The data will remain anonymous unless you wish to be formally quoted.
We hope that you feel comfortable in using this technology. Please email me at sintj002@umn.edu if you are having any technical problems, or if you wish me to further elaborate on a particular question. There is no right or wrong answer. Please share with us your point of view even if it is different from the point of view of other participants. Since this focus group is being conducted online, all of the text will be saved for future analysis. You are expected to participate for an average of 15 minutes a day, but you are welcomed and encourage to comment on the post of other participants. You are free to add to, to expand, or express your disagreement with a comment made by another person in this focus group. Feel free to have a conversation with other members of the room about the different questions. In addition, we are interested in hearing from everyone in this focus group. These questions do not require a prior understanding of the issues or the intricacies of the Open Access Movement, Open Education (OE), or Open Content (OC). As most graduate students currently conduct a large portion of their research online, while you may not be familiar with the terms, you are likely familiar with ways in which to search for articles and barriers that you may or may not meet when trying to access information online. Through this discussion we hope to learn more about your opinion and experiences. Thank you again for taking part in this conversation. This focus group will last five days, but you are welcomed to continue answering questions after that deadline if you were unable to answer the during the original dates. Let’s begin…
