Open Access Journal & Academic Magazines

Combined post on ALT’s decision to make its journal open access and a collection of academic publishing links I’ve been meaning to share for a while!

ALT’s Open Access Journal

Earlier this year Research in Learning Technology, the journal of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) switched to open access. I’m a Trustee of ALT and I’ve written a blog post on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog about why ALT made the switch: By freeing our journal from the ghetto of academic library subscriptions we will foster discussion and impact.

Academic Magazines

It’s been a very long time since I blogged here – over half a year (the shame!). I’ve been meaning to write a post around a bunch of links I’d been gathering since January 2011!

The initial article from a year ago was An academic angle on issues in a periodical for the people in the Times Higher Education which featured The Public Intellectual and started:

Between peer-reviewed journals and popular journalism lies a gap in which “the new knowledge, valuable critical insight, and fresh perspectives that academia produces” can be brought from behind pay walls to the wider readership it deserves.

Since then I’ve come across  a few other similar formats / approaches.

• The Public Intellectual
  Article types include: ‘think again’, ‘first person’ and ‘policy riffs’.
• The Conversation
  Australian, describes itself as “independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector”
• Social Europe Journal
  Publishing since 2005. A journal but shorter 500-700 word posts.
• Higher Education Teaching and Learning Portal
  Longer more journal-like format, including interviews, opinion pieces as well as longer features
  
• Social Science Space
  Run by SAGE Publishing, see Topics menu for blog posts.
• Politics in Spires
  Oxbridge collaboration
• LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences
  Posts on maximising the impact of academic work in the social sciences and other disciplines

The similarities, seem to be:

• Blog format but not necessarily recognisable or described as a blog
• Authors mainly working in academia
• Multi-author (& beyond a single institution)
• Reviewing by editorial team
• WordPress as the publishing platform

Disappointingly most are not licenced under creative commons with notable exceptions of ALT’s Journal, LSE Impact Oxbridge blogs.

As I’ve now switched from the world of Social Sciences to that of Computing, Information Science, Engineering & Maths, I’ll be on the lookout for more examples in that area.

If you’ve any examples of any kind please feel do add them below.

Challenges

Back from blustery, wet, humid Ireland.  That’s not fair.  It’s true but makes it sound like I had no fun which I did.  It was very beneficial for work too!  I’ve made a couple of posts over on my work blog – one on my presentation to a careers conference and one on a meeting about the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR).  I had a further meeting on Friday with Sharon Flynn who works for NUI Galway CELT and heads up the Learning Technology side of things.

Our conversation reminded me yet again of how many shared problems learning technology units have.  Not much of a surprise there but I find I tend to forget that between such meetings.  It got me to thinking about more ways of making this happen.  We have an M25 Learning Technology jiscmail & Moodle course with occasional get togethers but I got to thinking that isn’t this something that ALT should be enabling more of.

The HE careers services equivalemt (AGCAS) runs regular courses for its members.  For example there is one called “Challenges” where participants look at national, institutional and personal issues in the context of their service with a focus on contrasting there own experiences and learning from each other.  Perhaps i should drop an email to ALT…

Image: Galway http://flickr.com/photos/phalinn/348920424/