 Yes, I read with a long title. I was really excited when I put in my application for the talk. And then of course, you know, great news. It's been accepted. And then it's like, oh, about this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this. And then I pulled this stuff in. So hopefully I put together a coherent presentation for you today. My name is Kevin Strag, and I work for Simon Fraser University, which is in Vancouver, Canada. And a big part of my work there is working on the public knowledge project. And I'm going to be talking about some of our work. But really what I'm trying to do in the presentation today is, I think, almost for the first time, I'm trying to bring together three different spheres of my life into one coherent presentation. So if it's not coherent, I apologize, but hopefully it'll come together. But I'm an open source community coordinator at Simon Fraser University. I'm also a librarian. And I'm also a grad student in adult education. And as I pursue all of these separate worlds, I'm seeing overlaps all the time. And so this is an attempt to pull that together. The software I want to talk about is open journal systems that we at the Public Knowledge Project have developed and have been working on for over 10 years. I'm wondering how many people are familiar with open journal systems or OJS? Okay, there's a handful of people. One of the most important things to know about it is that it is open source. So I'm not here making a page for you to give me any money. It's completely free to come to our website, download it, install it, start using it. And most importantly, and maybe most importantly for this presentation, it's free and open in the sense that you can also modify it. So you don't have to use it just as you find it, but you can take it, manipulate it, and change it. And at the heart of the software is this idea that it's a publication management system, a peer review management system. In the way that WordPress is a CMS for a blog or Drupal can be a CMS for a website. OJS is a CMS for a peer review journal. And part of what I want to talk about today is how this growing community around our software actually broadened my understanding from just open access, which is where we started from, which was the whole reason for developing the software, into the broader idea of open education. Really the goal of our project initially was to facilitate the publication of open access journals. And this is one of my favorite examples, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. And it's online, it's peer reviewed, it's open access. And a great use of the software, they've got HTML, PDFs, EPUBs for your mobile reading. They've got MP3s of all the articles. They're doing a fabulous job. And our software gives them the platform for doing the publishing. It gives them the RSS feeds, the ability to export the content into other systems. All of that good stuff. For those of you who haven't seen it before, I'll give you just a couple of screenshots of what the content management system does. Anybody who wants to work with the software as an author, a reviewer, an editor would need an account that they can self-register. Authors would then log into the system and they would submit their article and it walks them through for the five-step process. The editor is notified automatically that there's a new submission waiting for them. They can have communication throughout the community. Software provides a lot of canned emails. And that's part of trying to build in efficiencies to make the software allow publishing to happen more efficiently, more quickly with the goal of reducing the operational costs and supporting the ability to publish without subscription fees. Peer reviewers are then invited to come and submit a review. They follow a similar five-step process. The editor can make the decision. Do we want to accept it? Are the revisions required? It then can go through the editorial stages of copy editing, layout editing, proof reading, and then ultimately an accepted submission is published. And a table of contents is automatically generated. All the links are put into place. So it really takes care of that for you. And so we've been doing this for a while. We've been pretty satisfied with the results. It's a little bit tricky with open-source software to know exactly how many people are using it as people can come and take it and set it up without telling us. We record the number of downloads, but we don't track who's using it and where it's being used. So we have to do some sort of crawling on the internet, Google searches to try to find out what there is. But we know there's about 10,000 installations around the world. So it's a pretty healthy community that we're feeling we're meeting the needs for. We've got an open-source community, lots of people participating. We have a support forum where the community content hangs out, asks questions, answers questions. About 30 translations have been done, either completed or in progress. That's all done by our volunteers. About 48% of the journals are in the developing world. We cover all subject areas. But a key point that I wanted to just raise briefly is that what we've really noticed is that while we've had a couple of publishing houses pick up the software small ones and make use of it, we're really seeing the rise of the scholar publisher and independent academic who has a passion about a topic realizes there's not really a need being met in the publishing world already. And they set up a new journal and this software really allows them to take control of the publishing process. The other thing we've seen a lot of is an uptake by academic libraries. And as libraries are starting to question what's our role going to be in the next century, a lot of them are seeing well, publishing support is part of that. Providing support services to these independent scholar publishers. So that'll factor into what I'm talking about. In terms of open educational resources, we were seeing a lot of open content being generated by all of these journals out there. So the Journal of Distance Education is an example of what we were expecting to see. Online, open access, scholarly content, perfect. And as I was looking through these 10,000 journals, always doing a count, that's what I was expecting to see. But I started to see things that I didn't expect. Some people are using it for archive journals. They'll take journals that were from, you know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, no longer in print. But they digitize them and they put them into our software to make them more visible and openly available. That was a surprise. Conference proceedings are going in there, rather than journal articles. Some people are even using it for books. But the one that I wanted to talk about today, or one of the two that I wanted to talk about today briefly, is the rise of student journals. And I wasn't expecting to see that at all. So we're seeing a lot of graduate students taking the software and setting up their own journals. So this is a journal by doctoral students in education. This is another journal by library school students. Another one by religious studies students. And this is by medical students. So they're really taking the initiative to take the software, set it up, and start publishing themselves. And when I thought about this in the context of all the things we're talking about in the conference today, I thought it was pretty interesting because it's open. The students are writing in public, which I think takes a lot of courage, and they're learning in public. They're being very open about the things that they're learning and communicating that message. It's experiential in that they're learning about the publishing process by actually doing it. They've got their hands on it and they're learning about how that works. It's collaborative because they're working with others as they work through the peer review process, as they improve the research and the writing skills. And it's self-directed because in most cases they've decided to do this all on their own. It was important to them, it was relevant to them, and they're going to run with it. And it's also connected. And I think this is a really important topic that's been coming out of this conference, that it's the connections that are as important as the content and learning. And by setting up a journal like this, they're building an online community of peers that they're working with and learning from. But it's not just graduate students, I'm seeing undergraduate journals as well that are popping up. And one of my favorite examples is a high school journal where grade nine and ten girls got together and formed their own journal. And I think that that's really an exciting opportunity to bring this into the classroom. And again, it's open, it's experiential, it's collaborative, it's connective. I left out self-directed because in most cases, things like high school journals or even undergrad journals generally have a faculty champion who's setting it up or the department has initially set it up and leads it and sort of acts as the editor-in-chief. But that doesn't always have to be the case. But it's also information-literate. And as a librarian, you know, I'll bring into my other sphere now, one of the things that we're really concerned about is building information literacy skills. And by being involved in these student journals, the students are actually learning about it by doing it. So instead of a librarian coming to their classroom and saying, this is what a peer-reviewed journal looks like, they know what a peer-reviewed journal looks like because they're doing it. And I think libraries have a really important role to play. Yeah. No, I can get a question. I was curious with the peer-review process when the students create their own journals, can they also select who they want to peer-review their articles? Or is it the two ancestors to do that? The editors would do that. So if a student is submitting, the author wouldn't pick the reviewer. It's a double-blind process. But the student editors would select people to be reviewers and they'd link them up. The reviewers wouldn't know who the author is, the author wouldn't know who the reviewer is. So would you limit the group, I guess, of reviewers? Absolutely. That's right. The software would let you allow anyone to register a reviewer if you wanted that, or you can restrict it so that only selected people are. Good one. So I mentioned earlier that libraries are starting to get interested in what role they can play in this whole future of digital publishing and online scholarship. Some of you may have heard of the crisis in scholarly communication, where the price of journals is outpacing library budgets incredibly. This has made libraries think, how can we do this differently? So we played a part in that. And some of the things that libraries are starting to do is set up these services for publishing. They're not actually becoming publishers in many cases, but are offering publishing support services. This is from Pittsburgh. They're doing a great job. This is from Columbia University, another example of York University up in Canada. The other thing that libraries are doing is setting up research commons, where they provide a space in the library for graduate students to come to access more advanced databases, to work with data, to manipulate data. But this is also a place where libraries can help them set up these kinds of research journals and give them support in doing that and playing a role in this. So it's really an opportunity for libraries to become a partner in learning in a way that maybe they haven't done before. And as I've already stated, it's open. It's experiential. It's collaborative. In many cases, it's self-directed. It's connected. And it's information-literate. So I think it's a really important opportunity for us to grasp. Now, I talked about unexpected uses of the software. Another one is as a course journal. And I haven't seen a whole lot of this and one of the reasons I came here today was I wanted to show this to people as it's just something that you might not think about in your own classroom or as a service in your own library. This is from Michigan State University, George Gerrity's biotechnology class. And he's set up an OJS journal, but he's using it almost like a learning management system to some degree. So there's links to course information, the schedule, the syllabus, library resources links, announcements. But at the same time, it's also a journal. So the students submit their assignments as if they were authors. The students then review each other's work. The instructor acts as the editor, sort of doing that traffic control of setting people up and matching authors to reviewers. And the best of those papers are published. So again, it's open, experiential, collaborative, connected, and information-literate. One of the things that we talk a lot about is plagiarism and the concern about plagiarism. And what can we do to help combat this problem and is the digital world making this even worse? And I don't have any hard evidence on this, but thinking about it, if you're told that you're going to be having your paper published and made openly available and that lots of people are going to be viewing it, not just your instructor, it might make you think twice before you try to rip off somebody else's work too easily. It might be an opportunity to just caution people about doing that. And the numbers can actually be pretty impressive. This is from George Garrett's class. His papers have been downloaded over 160,000 times. It's really getting uptake. 16 of the papers have been downloaded over 2,500 times, 68 of them over 1,000 times. I know lots of professional scholarly articles that don't see that kind of traffic at all. And if you just show this to your students and say, original work is a really good idea because you could have 2,500 eyeballs on there. So one more reason not to plagiarize. For libraries, again, I'll hit this once more. It's another opportunity to talk up a service with faculty. The expertise that libraries are developing in those publishing support systems I mentioned earlier could translate into the classroom as well. It could help librarians to link students' immediate course experience with the wider world of scholarly publishing. It's not so abstract anymore, but it's actually related to exactly what they're doing in the classroom. And librarians can also help students take the lessons that they're learning in this course and apply it to other courses. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity here to help students either through setting up these kinds of journals or through setting these up in the classroom and exposing them to the professional publishing process that many of them will go on to be part of. If this is interesting, if you think, hey, maybe I want to try this in my classroom or if my library wants to get more involved, that's the website for the Public Knowledge Project. You can find out lots there. There's a link to our support forum. As I said, that's where the community sort of hangs out and asks each other questions. That's my email address and I'm really happy to take questions if one occurs to you after we've all left the room. Shoot that to me. And that's my Twitter account as well. And I'm happy to communicate with people that way. So I wanted to try and keep it as brief as I could because I know we only have a little bit of time and I did want to ask questions and see what people think. Get feedback. Let me know if I wasn't coherent at all with my three spheres. But thanks a lot. How can I look at the site of the teacher? Now you can see what they see? I want to add to your article down to the account. What was the teacher's name or how did I find the site? Oh, sure. I don't have internet on here. But let me just go back to the slide. What is that? My glasses off here. Do you want the URL? No, that's probably it. Can you see it? I can probably just read it. Okay, that's got it. Yes? Do you see examples of these being openly licensed journals as well and sort of buying up the licenses that were for their creating content together or these journals are then being co-managed by different cohorts, not just by the teacher who uses it every year but cohorts, students, or groups. Right. A couple of things on that. The licensing one is a great question and one of the things we decided when we created the software was that we were going to stay agnostic in many of these issues. So we built this software for it to be open access publishing but there's a subscription module there because somebody in the community wanted that. So you can actually use our software for a completely subscription closed journal. Fair enough. Same licensing. We recommend a Creative Commons license being put on it but it's not a requirement. So every one of these journals that I show you could have made a different decision. The majority do use an open license so it is reproducible and open in that sense that we're talking about here today in this group. In terms of the cohort, in the course journal it tends to just be class to class to class. So with this one, I think that there's a new issue every year because the course is offered once a year and it's more contained. The student journals are more open so it'll be medical students who are putting this together and they welcome medical students from around the world and it's ongoing and a number of people will collaborate in the same way that philosophers will get together and collaborate to write an article and publish it in a traditional philosophy journal. You said that generally the departments will take the lead and structure it for the students. Has that been the only model that's been used? Have you seen other people go outside? There have been some ambitious students who will set it up on their own. What I've seen as well is maybe a student society, the geography undergraduate student association will get the idea to do this and they'll take ownership of it and run with that. That tends to be a fairly sustainable model but the most common one is for undergrads, especially either an individual faculty member who sees this as something, a department might see it as useful. The other area that I think that we could see a lot more of this in is universities that offer an award for the best undergraduate paper. That's great to offer that award but to take that paper and then put it down here somewhere. No, take that paper and have a journal and every year maybe you've got four award winners, publish them, put them out there, celebrate that it's there. I think that would be another really good use. Any other questions? We've got three more minutes. So these journals are speed and oriented journals so what are some different cities that you see holiday wise in these student journals and I guess traditional journals? Sure, that's a great question and there is a difference because of the level of expertise that a traditional scholarly writer would bring. They've got a whole background, a whole lifetime behind them and looking at these issues and for the students this is newer so you have to expect that there's not going to be the same level of experience and expertise behind it but what I really love is the term peer review because they're peers we so often make a simplistic equation that peer review means that it's a PhD approved. No, I mean that's often what is the end result but in fact it means that people who are peers with one another are reviewing these and assessing it for a similar kind of audience and if they happen to be grade nine girls that's perfectly fine. Yes? They can, again this is where our software is agnostic. Our software doesn't actually generate the end product usually a manuscript goes through the system as a word document, most authors that's what they have and that's what they do it would be the role of the layout editor within the journal to take that word document and then build a pdf or html epub mp3 whatever they want to do, whatever tools they have and the software will let them link up all of those. I have one last question, anybody? Oh god, I've answered them all there's no more questions Again, I'll just zip up here Anything comes to you later, please let me know I'm happy to talk about this and engage in further conversations. Thanks a lot.