The majority of the delegates present were from from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. When asked, around 75% admitted that they had no involvement whatsoever with any of the social media or networking tools I was talking about. I had to pause at this point to rub my eyes. How can you expect to understand what your students are doing if you don't yourself engage with these tools? was my challenge. I think some were quite appalled when I suggested that even if they ban mobile devices and social networks in their classrooms (which many are doing), the students will still continue to use them, probably under the tables. There were some worried glances when I suggested that the reason students are using mobile devices and social media in the classroom might be to check out how accurate and truthful the lecturer's statements are. This kind of challenge to authority may not be palatable for many conservative academics, but its a plain fact - it happens all the time, and it will grow in its intensity and reach. My message was - get over it - it isn't going away.
I also caused a few ripples on the normally placid pond of academic publishing by showing some recent figures on how successfully the major publishers are exploiting our good will in offering our work to them for free. I called for an end to the enormous profiteering that is currently perpetrated by some publishers, and pointed out that often, public money has funded the research that ends up behind a paywall. That was the main reason, I declared, that I resigned from my job as Co-editor of a major Taylor and Francis journal late last year. I could not, in good conscience, continue to help the publishers to line their pockets off the back of free labour, and publicly funded research that ended up behind a pay wall, read by very few people who had the means to pay for it.
I cited figures from two of my own papers, both published around the same time (in the slideset above) which showed the unacceptable editorial/review lead in times for many closed journals in comparison to open online journals. Paper based journals suffer from editorial back logs and there is little they can do to alleviate this problem. Some have established online 'early' publishing systems that host accepted papers prior to full publication, but they remain behind the paywalls. The most stunning comparison I offered was between the citations metrics of my two papers. The closed journal paper had received 19 citations against 511 for the open journal publication in the same time period. This alone, I argued, shows that open journals have the edge over closed journals, with many, many more people reading the free to view articles. If we want widespread dissemination of our findings, we need to look to the open journals, with their vast readerships.
During the question time, objections were voiced. I expected it. One delegate claimed that the review processes for open journals were not as rigorous. Well, that's just your perception, I countered, and it's a very challengable statement. I pointed out that in some open journals, review processes are even more rigorous - my open access journal article for example, was reviewed by three separate reviewers. The fact that they were unblinded (they knew our author names and we knew their names) and that the reviews and our responses were posted up online alongside the paper openly, created a higher quality, and more transparent review than the traditional closed, double blinded reviews could ever hope to achieve. Well, I did my best, and hopefully, some delegates will have a Damascus Road experience before they submit their next journal article. Perhaps some will think twice about banning mobile devices and social media in their classrooms in the future - and hope against hopes - some may even take the plunge and subscribe to a social network or two. We live in hope.
Damascus Road by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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