Tomorrow's Scholarship in Education: Free-to-Read

2005

Tomorrow's Scholarship in Education: Free-to-Read

Gene V Glass
Regents’ Professor
Arizona State University

On Wednesday, March 2, 2005 the College of Education was visited by 6,235 persons, and not a single one of them had trouble finding a place to park. They made a “virtual” visit via the internet, seeking research reports and scholarly articles in one of the College's six “open access” (i.e., free to read) peer reviewed scholarly journals. And they made their virtual visit to the College without leaving the comfort of their office, or they lab, or their own home in Massachusetts, or Oslo, or Beijing, or Belarus. And nothing was special about March 2nd, just a typical Wednesday in a week when five times that many persons made a virtual call on ASU College of Education.

Beginning in 1993, when the World Wide Web was not even a dream in computer hackers’ minds and the limits of human ingenuity seemed to everyone to have been reached by BITNET—now a faded memory—the College of Education launched its first effort in the open access to scholarly knowledge movement, a cause today endorsed by no less a capitalist than George Soros. We were among the first to grasp the significance for research and scholarship of this evolving medium, and our dedication to the non-commercial communication of scholarly writings in education has not wavered. Today, the ASU College of Education publishes six peer-reviewed scholarly journals that remain free to readers everywhere. In the face of profits in academic publishing of 30%, 40% and more in some cases, we have remained steadfast in our belief that no one should have to pay twice for the fruits of scholarship. Once to produce it is enough; its communication can and should be free of cost.

If visibility and access are a measure of success, then our position has been vindicated. Thousands of individuals travel each day to the College websites to download research articles that have been submitted, peer reviewed, and published on behalf of authors from around the world. Faculty, students, policy analysts, and newspaper reporters are numbered among the many who read our journals; but teachers, administrators, and school board members read as well. In fact, one third of all the visitors enter the journal websites from outside the “.edu” domain, meaning that they may not be directly affiliated with a university. And two of our journals even publish in Spanish and Portuguese as well.

The oldest of our journals is the Education Policy Analysis Archives (http://epaa.asu.edu), currently in its thirteenth year of continuous publication. EPAA has published over 600 research articles. Founded in 1993 by Gene V Glass with the help of a distinguished Editorial Board or reviewers, EPAA has been widely cited and frequently honored for its contributions to scholarship in education. One article alone, “Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998,” has been “downloaded” over 100,000 times since its publication in March 1999. Also in 1999, EPAA began considering submitted manuscripts written in Spanish and Portuguese. Now under the editorship of College of Education faculty member Gustavo Fischman and Pablo Gentili of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas (AAPE), as it is known in the Spanish-speaking world, publishes some 15 to 20 articles each year in either Spanish or Portuguese. With the 2005 volume of EPAA, the Editorship of EPAA was passed to Dr. Sherman Dorn of the University of South Florida; the technical support and websites for EPAA remain at ASU. AAPE continues to be edited at ASU by Drs. Fischman and Gentili.

On January 6, 1998, the College launched the second of its e-journals with the Education Review (http://edrev.asu.edu), a journal devoted to reviews of recently published scholarly and practitioner books in education. Joined in this endeavor by Kate Corby of the Michigan State University Libraries, Gene Glass saw the need then and now more than ever for scholarly critiques of education books. The economics of desktop publishing have created a situation in which more books in education are being published than there are reviews of books. This seemed backwards to our editors and they have worked diligently for the past eight years to reverse the situation. In August 2001, they were joined again in this endeavor by Dr. Gustavo Fischman, and since then more than 120 reviews written in Spanish or Portuguese have been published. All told, the ER has published more than 1,300 book reviews since its inception. All reviews are free to read.

In November 1998, under the direction of then Dean David C. Berliner, the College of Education launched a unique scholarly publication entirely under the management of advanced doctoral students. Modeled after Harvard Educational Review and numerous student managed law journals, Current Issues in Education (http://cie.asu.edu) entertains submissions from scholars world wide and publishes those that receive endorsement by peer reviewers. CIE is visited by an average of 800 persons each weekday seeking to download research articles.

Professor Thomas Barone of the College’s Division of Curriculum and Instruction founded the e-journal entitled the International Journal of Education and the Arts (http://ijea.asu.edu) in collaboration with Dr. Liora Bresler of the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign. First published in March 2000, IJEA is a unique publication in educational scholarship, ideally suited to the portrayal of art education through the use of intensive graphic representations, audio clips and even video demonstrations of dance and music.

Continuously since 1961, the Journal of American Indian Education (http://jaie.asu.edu) has been published by the Center for Indian Education of the College. Always a small, select scholarly journal, the JAIE is an important historical document as well as a contemporary source for some of the best thinking on American Indian education. In 2000, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation made a small grant to the Center to electronically scan and place on the web for open access the forty volumes of the JAIE. Under the Editorship of Dr. David Beaulieu, JAIE continues to make new issues available to all through the world wide web, and the visibility and influence of JAIE continue to grow.

ASU may have been first on the scene of open access journals in education and may now publish more journals than any college of education in the world, but if it remains the only player in this field, it will have failed to blaze a trail to a future in which the only persons to profit from scholarly publications will be the public who read them. To spread the word, ASU faculty recently spearheaded the creation of a Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association with the mission to “… facilitate research on the nature of communication of educational research; to expand the understanding and promote the effective use of information technology and library-based resources in educational research.” The SIG known as Communication of Research (http://aera-cr.asu.edu/) maintains a website with links to over 100 peer-reviewed scholarly journals in education, all free-to-read.