The Wonderful World of Open Access

I'm one of the editors of an open access journal, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, it's about the wider world of open access, which I've blogged about before, with some charts and stats. The web is full of opinions on open access, with comments from sceptics, advocates and others somewhere in between. I'm really excited by open access publishing, but of course - like any publishing model - it's not perfect. What I've been doing over the past few years is trying to learn a lot more about the world of open access and really understand what the open access landscape looks like. 

In doing so, I've become pretty familiar with where to find information and for this purpose DOAJ is my first port of call. What you find out very quickly is that there are literally thousands of open access journals - about 10,000 - and that they constitute a very diverse, colourful group. One way to demonstrate this is to look at the metadata on the DOAJ website. Here you can find, amongst other things, a list of URLs. So, I took a screenshot of them all - the results of which you can see here (or by clicking the image below - it takes a while to load).

Why on earth did I do this? Partly as a little spare time project to see how easily it could be done but mostly because I wanted a quick way to see what all the websites looked like - i.e. how many are full-blown fancy websites backed by international publishing houses and how many are more small-scale ventures. It also allows you to more easily identify families of open access journals (scroll down and you'll see quite a bit of this). This doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality of journals (that's for readers to decide) but it does provide a visual overview in a more accessible way. Looking through the full list of 10,000 websites would take a little longer! I used a Firefox extension for this task, and it did take quite a while. The DOAJ spreadsheet I used is from late in 2013 so some more recent journals are not included. To finish with, here are some of my favourites...

'Fast Capitalism' - I love the name and the musical intro:

'Studies in Social Justice' - nice cover shot:

'International Journal of Dental Clinics' - so many languages:

'Reading in a Foreign Language' - I just like this idea:

Not sure what caught my eye about this one, but I like it:

ESRC Success Rates 2011/12

I'm currently in the process of thinking about submitting another ESRC grant proposal. To date, I have put in a few but without success. I'm not easily discouraged though and I have had a lot of good feedback (but no money!). Thankfully, I have been able to secure funding from other sources but the vital statistics from ESRC do suggest that I might need to up my game considerably - or switch to Socio-Legal Studies! What am I talking about? Success rates of course. The LSE Impact blog just did a post on this issue and the figures really are striking. So striking, in fact, that I felt the need to turn it into a chart. Just look at the data (click charts below). 39% success rate for Socio-Legal Studies and 0% success rate for Environmental Planning (among others).

Click chart to enlarge

Click chart to enlarge

In relation to the number of submitted grants, Psychology is the clear category leader with 185, though the success rate in this category is just slightly higher than the average (16% compared to 14% average). The highest number of grants to any one category is in Sociology, with 16 awards (19% success rate) during the 2011-12 period.

See the full ESRC report here, where you can also find a break down of the figures by institution.

It has to start somehwere

I have just arrived in the blogosphere after much deliberation about whether or not I have anything useful/interesting to say. This should become clear over time. I aim to write on my work on screeencasting, e-learning, GIS, urban things to do with my work as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies at the University of Manchester and anything else I want to. Perhaps other people with similar interests with their own blogs will find me and we can compare notes. So, what to write about today? For my first post I've decided to talk about my current work developing screencasts (eh?) for teaching here at the University of Manchester. A screencast is a video demo of some kind of computer activity. Read on...

Screencasting - Being in Two Places at Once
A lot has been written about screencasting. It's not new. Neither is e-learning. Yet the two are not as well acquainted as they ought to be. In any class where software is taught there is only so much time that you can spend helping individual students, so having a back-up is ideal. This is where screencasting comes in. You just record your screen activity and then save it for playback later by ultra-keen, interested students (just like the ones at the University of Manchester). Host it on a virtual learning environment (a fancy term for web pages for university classes) and let students go wild learning all about it. Here's an example (reduced in size):

Essentially, it allows you to be in two places at once demonstrating a piece of software, or in the case of the above showing how to download data from an online data store. I suppose it really allows you to be in as many places at once as there are people using it. Isn't this the whole point of e-learning? As a result of my enthusiasm for screencasting, my interest in e-learning and the fact that I teach a range of different software skills at the University of Manchester (including GIS), I have embarked on an ambitious project which aims to produce lots of screencast content for students in the School of Environment and Development here.

There's not really much more to say about it at this stage but I'll be writing more in the near future.