In his article, “Open Access and the Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over,” UBC School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies Assistant Professor Rick Kopak puts forth a positive review of Open Access (OA) and the Open Journal Systems (OJS), discussing ways in which OA and OJS can serve as wholly positive technologies in the effort to encourage our students’ critical thinking skills.
A serious issue facing K-12 teachers and TLs today is the pressing need to teach digital literacy to students, and the rush to find quality resources and tools to do so effectively has this teacher, at least, scrambling. Because cultivating the ability to successfully search for, find, evaluate, and use quality information is a skill that I regard as so important for students to master, I feel a genuine sense of urgency around teaching this skill and teaching it well. Kopak hints at the genesis of this sense of anxiety that I feel as a teacher: “The increasing availability of information via the Web brings much of good quality, but also much of less discernible authority, trustworthiness, and provenance.”
The good news offered by OJS technology, then, is that it offers greater access to “the production and distribution of the main currency of the academic research process, the scholarly journal article.” In this way, my students researching particular topics for personal or group projects would now have a new option for their first source for information searching rather than that current—and relatively long-standing—favorite, Google. Essentially, OJS give students easy access to quality information. Granted, this quality information may also be available on databases that the school library subscribes to, but OJS has the obvious advantage of being free and accessible to all—not just students enrolled in my school with passwords to access my library’s database subscription. As a result, OJS, in some ways, helps skirt one of the big issues that many students (and teachers, horrifyingly witnessing the result of student research) face: successfully locating quality information on the Web. This one detail looms large in the lives of some students: some of my students feel so overwhelmed by the thought of sifting through Web-based information in order to locate usable information that they sometimes procrastinate in their efforts on what should be a fairly simple assignment; when simply finding acceptable content is only the first step in a project, and even that step seems consistently insurmountable—to overdramatize the situation in distinctly teenage fashion—“Why go on!?”
The above is not to say that OJS are a panacea with the effect of teachers no longer needing to teach digital literacy to students. OJS are, however, powerful tools that enable students to have a first place to look—at least one de facto “wise choice” that can be made before diving into the information sea—or crawling upon that information web?—that is Google.
As an additional benefit, OJS include an interface—known as Reading Tools—that provides a number of items that enrich the learner’s experience with the online scholarly article, ideally leading to great critical engagement. The Reading Tools space for any article includes links to such things as the following:
• “Abstract” provides the abstract in a second window
• “Review policy” provides information about the journal’s policies for receiving and reviewing submissions
• “How to cite the item” includes quick information on article citation
• “Supplementary files” include downloadable supporting materials associated with the article
• “Notify colleague” provides an instant email client with the title of the article in the subject line
• “Email the author” provides the same but with the author’s email address inserted
These features have obvious potential for increasing students’ critical engagement with an article, and serve as excellent examples of productive applications of the web 2.0 hallmark of information-sharing and collaboration.
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