Seeking Sustainability in the Widening World of Undergraduate Journals
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00:00
Vorlesung/Konferenz
04:12
Vorlesung/Konferenz
07:03
Besprechung/Interview
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Vorlesung/Konferenz
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Besprechung/Interview
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Besprechung/Interview
Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
00:00
Okay, hello everyone, I'm Sonia Betts from the University of Alberta. And Robin Hall from McEwen University in Edmonton. We're gonna do a super speedy intro to some student journal issues we've been mulling over recently. And I'm hoping that we can start a bit of a conversation with you guys about some ideas we have for better supporting student journals. So I'm so glad Suzanne that your talk came right before ours.
00:23
Robin's developed this fantastic caterpillar analogy for our talk, and I think it's pretty apt. If you can imagine students as emerging academics doing research worthy of sharing while gaining experience in academic publishing. All right, so we have at the University of Alberta several student journals,
00:40
both undergraduate and graduate level student journals. However, I think when we talk about success stories around student journals, we're almost always in the background balancing that by the many challenges and obstacles around sustainable student publications. For example, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but of the ten student journals we list on our website, only six are actually actively publishing or actively trying to publish.
01:03
Four have ceased publication entirely due to reasons that I think we're all familiar with and that Suzanne just articulated a little bit in her talk. So what can we do to help support students more fully? Forward the slide. I love the comments about an advisory committee. I think that's a fantastic idea.
01:21
And a few ideas at the U of A that I'm pretty excited about. We've developed a partnership with our undergraduate research initiative. And they're a group that provides great opportunities for undergrads to do research on campus. They're working on a new student journal called Spectrum that we'll be hosting, but we've also been working with them on educational events for students. So we're planning a year-long seminar series that will feature sessions
01:42
throughout the year on things like peer review, author rights, licensing and copyright, recruiting reviewers and content for a journal, how to use OJS, all those great things. And another small step that we're taking is to develop a bit of a community of practice for our student journal editors. So earlier this year, we held an introductory round table, inviting all of those student editors to meet each other.
02:01
We facilitated a conversation amongst them and asked them about what challenges they'd faced, how they'd solved their problems, and how we could help. So it was a good opportunity for them to meet each other. And we got some really useful directions to pursue for the future. Okay, thank you. So at McEwen University, we only have two undergraduate journals, but they've both been going for about five years.
02:22
So I consider these successes so far, but we're still learning a lot as we go. It takes a village, a large village to keep undergraduate journals going, I've learned. Definitely helps to have faculty members as the journal managers and the faculty champion to keep them going, but also support from the library and the research office and IT, all of that stuff.
02:42
Here's the important stuff that we really wanted to get to though and talk to you about. Academic publishing is robust. There's lots of options out there for established academics. Could we be doing more to help our little caterpillars and to nurture undergraduate publishing? We think yes, there's lots of initiatives out there. There's definitely at least hundreds of undergraduate journals in existence.
03:04
But we, whoops, yes, we do think that we should be doing more. One thing that we've definitely noticed is that it's really, really hard to find undergraduate journals. There's no one-stop shop to locate these things. And then it's really hard to figure out if those journals accept works from
03:21
students outside of their institution, or if they're tied to a class or not. So what we'd like to propose and what we're wondering from everyone here and beyond is whether it might be viable to create a directory of open access student journals similar to the directory of open access journals where people can go and actually find undergraduate works. But also find some documentation on best practices for
03:42
starting these journals and keeping them going. We're just hoping to start a conversation. We have given you our Twitter handles and our email addresses, and now you know our faces as well. So we hope that today and beyond that you'll come and speak to us if you would like to partner with us, if you think it's a good idea, if you think it's a bad idea.
04:00
Yeah, that's kind of the seeds of our idea here is to start supporting these more in that capacity. Thank you. Okay, at this point I'd like to invite all of the speakers on stage and invite questions from the audience about some innovative and
04:26
interesting uses of OJS and OMP. There are a couple mics out there. Don't be shy.
04:54
Just curious about mediating new and young scholars as they start to produce scholarship for undergraduate journals.
05:03
How did they break OJS? These are kids who have been doing things online and maybe differently. They aren't having any pride loose of Microsoft Word like we have to with many of our more established scholars. How are they breaking it? What are they doing wrong and that we should be listening to?
05:25
I don't think they're breaking anything. I think that they're just using it for purposes which they intend that maybe we don't intend them to use it for but it has a lot to do with the metadata stuff that Mike talked about in his lightning talk yesterday. I think forcing things into fields that you wouldn't expect them to put
05:40
things into. They also really want more flexibility around the content. I found that they really want to create pages that describe what the journal is all about or they want to do things like, we have the Alberta Law Review and every year they do a special issue on energy law and they really want a way to highlight those special issues in exciting new ways.
06:00
And they can't really do that with OJS too, so I don't know. Does anybody else have other things they've seen? I can speak from my experience with the classes that we're working with. Students are really interested in including a significant number of images in their work and so that just creates kind of a logistical challenge for us getting all those up and running.
06:24
We have audio and video, so students are really interested in doing audio video posts and it's sort of tricky right now in OJS to provide nice, seamless streamed media content for a student that may not have the skills to develop nice XML files. So I'd like to see those developed a bit.
06:42
And just one addition to that, in terms of processes for OJS, the key thing that students want is ease. Easy submission, just seamless, painless kind of one step processes. So I really wanted to highlight that because it's really important.
07:02
So I don't think any of the students that I worked with broke the OJS. I think the OJS may have broken them. In some ways, I mean, it's a great tool, but it is difficult sometimes to maneuver, it's not intuitive for them. But I did attend the session discussing the 3.0 and
07:22
I'm really excited about those new features and those new interfaces. I think that will really ease the use of OJS and participation in the scholarly journal process.
07:41
So just some comments first of all, but I will get to a question. And again, this is from the self-serving perspective of PKP. It's really exhilarating, exciting to just hear the whole range of rather strange, unusual, even possibly bizarre ways you're repurposing OJS to do all sorts of things. Some of it's really affirming because when we talk about student journals,
08:01
for example, we see lots of evidence out there that there's incredible number of student journals happening. In fact, Kevin and Jana, even another iSchool student from UBC that's here, we collected a bunch of information on over 400 plus scholarly journals, OJS journals hosted at Canadian sites.
08:20
Fully a third of them were undergraduate or graduate students. So something's happening there, and I think your presentations gave us a lot of good examples of that. And I think, Sonia, where you were asking, is there a list out there of it, at least in the Canadian context, we can give you a little starter of probably about 130 student-run journals if you wanna go and mine them.
08:41
It was equally interesting to hear from Israel on how you're using OJS in another way, and this is one that's been kicking around because about every few months we see another one popping up where somebody ended up using that sort of workflow around peer review almost essentially as an academic adjudication system. And not that we're looking for more work on the PKP side, but
09:02
it's fascinating to see those. Ditto for it in terms of digital humanities projects and looking at Queens there, whether OJS3 can be morphed into that. Since it's exhilarating, it's also, from our perspective, a little bit overwhelming because potentially that represents a whole lot of kind of stretching and pulling and twisting OJS in a whole bunch of different directions,
09:24
which requires resources. And I'm getting to my question now, but essentially OJS is really purpose-built in many ways to be an academic journal peer review workflow. And it's interesting to see how you're using it in different ways. But the question is, did you go and look at other sort of alternatives for
09:46
say academic adjudication or a digital humanities sort of support or scholarly product support forum rather than using just OJS? And how did you end up in OJS for some of these rather different uses? So I'd be interested just if any of you can shed comments on that.
10:04
Okay, so for the Queen's perspective for this sort of digital humanities push, we used OJS because first of all, it was a ready platform that we already had. Secondly, the journal team, they're one of our founding journals,
10:23
and they want to push the envelope a little bit with their journal. And I guess, respecting the sense or the original goal for OJS being a journal publishing peer review infrastructure. One of the key messages that I think I took from meeting with this journal
10:44
team was, and it fits with the questions that have come up so far today around deconstructing the traditional journal. I think it's already happening. I think it's a need that faculty want, that we need to unpack. So even if our systems have originally been designed in a way that
11:04
wants to be sort of your traditional PDF file that is a journal with an abstract, a discussion, and I think things are moving more quickly. And I really think we need to take the challenge and adapt.
11:21
PKP, it's at a nice point where it's institutional led. It's not a commercial entity. I think that's something that we really should capitalize on in responding to these new needs that are already there. So I guess, yeah.
11:42
Just to clarify what I'm doing here. I'm just a volunteer to WERGS, is the State University of hikonosu. But in my employee job, we use OJS to do our journals too. And this is the older history. And the beginning, we had journals from 1987.
12:04
And we have to move from emails to something that help us, the workflow. So it's the same thing that works. You need to move from email to something that's not expensive, because at WERGS, in specific case, we do not have a TI staff to take care of OJS.
12:24
The only person who does that is me. And even the backup, I need to talk to someone. May I do the backup? I have to go to the building in my lunch time and do everything. So OJS was the alternative to choice because we do not need to expend money or something.
12:45
All other solutions would demand or training with the money or something else. So this solution was not touch a single line of code. I do not have touch code, develop new code. One thing just the authors of research asked to change,
13:02
author to coordinator, that will be changed someday. Well, it's another problem I have to face to code outside. Here at Canada, I can't touch the code on the OJS in the works. So the solution was taken to not expensive and easy to understand and common knowledge of all researchers.
13:25
Just I'm an author, now I'm a coordinator. That's it. Thank you all. I have a long list of to dos and to explores. With regard to student use or use of OJS as a pedagogical tool.
13:49
I differentiate a bit between student journals where it is a formal journal process versus course use. And I'm wondering, what is your experience working with
14:01
those journals about the student who is not successful? What about the sort of refusal rate and also the students who decide, yeah, maybe they're not so proud of their undergraduate work backward. How are you doing with repudiation and take down requests?
14:22
Yeah, it's something we take very seriously. I guess I didn't have time to kind of talk about this, but we do really encourage instructors to pitch this to 400 level students who are ready. They're writing a capstone paper. It's an appropriate use of their final papers. I wouldn't encourage someone in a 100 level
14:40
course to necessarily be putting student work online. That doesn't mean you can't, but it's one of those things where we wanna make sure that they are proud of their work, that they get the chance to do a peer review, they get the chance to go through the editing process and revising. And we wanna be responsive to students who say, you know what, this just isn't for me. And obviously that's negotiated with the instructor deciding whether or
15:02
not students must publish their work online. But there's no reason why they couldn't use OGS to go through the scholarly communications workflow, experience what it's like to do the peer review, and then just not post the final paper. We've also worked with an instructor that only posted excerpts of the students' work, cuz she just felt that that was a stronger representation of
15:20
their writing ability. So we're trying to negotiate that and be respectful of what the students want. Yeah? So on the Internet, there's one of my undergraduate student essays. I'm so embarrassed about it, but I don't know how to get someone to take it down. Don't search for it.
15:41
What we've noticed for, we've hosted undergraduate journals for a very long time, and maybe Leah can confirm this, but I don't think we've ever had a takedown request from a student for an article that they've written. So I think the problem is out there and exists, but I think that the cases are so infrequent that we could probably deal with it on a case by case basis.
16:00
But definitely I think that's a concern. We are working on a project right now with a high school to put capstone papers for AP students, so that's grade 12 students working on a final big research project, and I've been thinking about this a lot, too. So how do we manage those students who aren't even 18 yet when they're publishing that content, and what are their rights around owning it and
16:21
taking it down when they want it taken down? I think that falls in with best practices, though, and it just occurred to me, we have nothing about takedown on our websites for our student journals, and we probably should have a little statement there. If you want this taken down, here's what you can do sort of thing, but we've never had that request either, but conceivably I could see that happening, so
16:41
we should take that into account. Well, so Sonia and Robyn kind of invited us to chat here with this idea of those at the end, so maybe I'll kind of get that conversation started. Certainly we can continue it later over lunch or whatever. So you floated this idea of a directory of undergraduate open access journals or
17:01
open access undergraduate journals or whatever. Student journals. Student journals, right, sorry. So my first thought with that is that the directory of open access journals, I think, kind of serves two different purposes right now. So when you go to the website, it looks like it's meant to be a portal to discover scholarship, which it sort of can be.
17:21
But my sense is that not many people use it that way, right? They come to these journals through other discovery paths, which is a broader trend in library resources as a whole, for example. So what it actually does is mostly serve as a white list of vetted journals and
17:41
a sort of talking point for open access advocates to say there are however many, 9,000 vetted journals, so see, there's a lot of open access out there. And so it actually kind of serves that purpose. And I think for a directory of student journals, the need for a white list or for numbers are less clear.
18:02
But if you really just wanna share best practices, I mean, maybe what we just need is a kind of Google Docs file of best practices that we start sharing around and I'll contribute our ideas and try to sort of evolve and build up something, a shared resource in that way. So those are my initial thoughts on that. Thank you for the feedback. There is, it's just, it's really hard to find these journals.
18:22
And more and more, I'm getting students and faculty coming to me saying, this student, or I produce this really great work and I wanna publish it. Where can I publish it? It's so hard to find journals for them. And I know they exist, they definitely do. And so having that one stop shop and having search facets that really are specific to students would be really helpful too in such a directory.
18:42
Cuz there are a few student journals in the DOAJ, but yeah, it's really hard to search through those, so. Just to add to that, I think one of the problems that we do have with student journals is sustainability. And so if we were able to create really strong subject-specific student journals
19:03
where a film studies student who wants to publish their work would know that there's a good one to go to rather than deciding to create their own. It lasts for a couple years at their university until someone can sustain it. So I think it's a possible way to kind of respond to those issues. You're talking about journals that are subject-specific but
19:23
will publish student work from anywhere. And I assumed we were talking about journals that publish more or less any topic, but only from their institution. So everything I said was from that perspective. When you have journals like this, it's a different picture, and now I see where you might well need a directory. I just wanted to point out that we do have two DOAJ ambassadors,
19:42
at least in the crowd, I think, both Ina and Yvonne. So maybe you can just raise your hands so that if you can, yeah. And then if you wanna follow up on how DOAJ is actually used, there are probably two good people to talk to. Not going for a question? Ooh, fake out.
20:05
Okay, so I think we'll wrap up here. I did wanna take a moment to, again, thank all of our presenters for sharing their work with us this morning.
20:22
We're gonna be breaking out.