 Yeah, I have a few slides, but I'm going to start off a little bit differently because this is a presentation on how to get published. So I'll start off with people if you have questions at the beginning. And then I'll answer the questions as best I can. So can we start off with a few questions? I'm sure some of you have come with some problems you've had with publishing or lack thereof. Yes, at the back. Thanks, Rory. Bonnie Stewart from Windsor in Canada. I'm going to try to adapt my question initially for Judith and frame something for you. I recognize that in the European context, higher ed is fully kind of government funded, but as, you know, in Canada and the US and other spots, it isn't necessarily. And so what I'm seeing with publishing, particularly for those of us who are early career researchers, is there are some great journals that are fully open, but a lot of publishing spaces are becoming more and more enclosed and have very expensive open access fees for digital journals, even though the writing is, you know, contributed by academics, the reviewing is done for free by academics. And if you have a $2,000 grant total, you can't pay for a $3,500 open access publishing fee, and it's not paid by your university. And I feel like this is a real challenge for at least large swaths of the open education community. I know it's not the kind of work you represent, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can work together to actually open access. Well, I can say that I don't think that we should be collaborating with those that have these very high publishing fees. And I think that it's a big mistake in Europe for governments to be paying huge amounts of money to the monopoly capitalist companies that are now really trying to take full control over all of academic publishing. So I would recommend strongly don't do it. And if you must get published in that particular high value or highly rated journal, is don't pay any open access publishing fees at all and just put your article out anyway. It's a pre-publishing on your site or on a repository, sped it around, put it on other places. And you can do it as long as it's a pre-published article, you can do it legally. And it'll get your article out there in any case. But I don't think that we should be cooperating with them at all. I think it's a huge, I mean, this is what you call open washing, that you're paying the big publishers in order for them to be open access. Robert from the Netherlands, I totally agree and I will want to add to the previous question. Recently, just recently, there has been an initiative to promote the diamond access open journals in Europe. I don't have the details directly at hand, I can look it up and make it available. You can, there's a kind of, what's it called, you can understand it, but they're also now doing all kinds of initiatives to promote this one. The second is that you mentioned the publishing, the publish or perish is actually the main course of all this publishing which is done and which you should do in those not open access journals. Otherwise, your career is harmed and there is, now I can say the situation in the Netherlands, there is now a recognition and reward initiatives around all universities to make, to get the pressure of this only publishing takes you any further in your career. And I think that would really deserve some attention to get away from this publish or perish way of working. But because that's the real cause and the third thing I want to add is what they call the predatory journals. There is not so many known about these kinds of journals. Now, you know, each one gets this advertised publishing in our journal through time of one month. Now, how good could be the review if you publish it or you send it in at first of April and this published at first of May and when you look at all those articles in those kinds of journals, it's always this one month. There can't be any good that could be a sign, but people don't know this. Yeah. Just to clarify what Robert's talking about is with diamond open access, you do not pay any article publishing costs. And the big one was, of course, they were pushing what was gold open access where you pay for in gold, you pay for the article processing costs. So that's it's a big actually diamond is only just become up as a label. And I can assure you that our journal is a diamond gold and access diamond open access journal. We do not charge publishing fees. Any other questions? Yes. No, go ahead. Oh, so following up on what Bonnie had mentioned and also open washing. And I would be I'd be really curious to hear from you what your recommendation would be to some of these, you know, younger researchers who are looking to publish. When you're looking at, you know, wanting to de-invest in some of these, you know, I would say conglomerates at this point, like that are double dipping basically like Elsevier and having people pay to publish and then charging people back to access it. The tenure promotion process at many institutions, at least in the in the US, really mandate for faculty to publish in specific titles. They're mandated by their departments, by their institutions. They are looking at, you know, job security and advancing their careers based on titles and their impact factor and whatnot. And so for those who are balancing out against, you know, maintaining their university position and de-investment, what would you suggest? Well, again, I'd say the same thing is don't pay the the APC to make it open. Some of them what $15,000 I've heard. I've seen $7,500. Don't pay it, get it published under the under the strict regulations they have and put your article up as a pre-pub. So as people do have access to it, but we're also finding, and I understood in the US was moving that way too, but I know Canada and a lot of places are, is that if your government funded, it has to be open access. And this is very new. And actually our journal, I believe it was the first open access journal in Canada, I haven't heard of any other, but we had a big fight with our government funding agencies at the beginning in the year 2000 until 2004. And we fought very, very heavily. We lobbied, we protested, did all kinds of things in order to get accepted. And we were finally accepted in 2004 as the first open access journal to be to receive a grant from the federal government. And believe it or not, in 2017 they changed their whole method and they say now everything must be open access. So we've come a long way since then. There was another question over here. Yeah. Thank you. Hi. Devil in the room, so I work for Frontiers. However, I do manage a diamond open access journal like yourself. My question actually has actually just been partially answered by you in terms of model. Would you think that in terms of scaling up diamond open access long term, is it essentially a case of direct governmental funding rather than researchers providing the resources? Because of course sustainability has to be considered here. And I'm curious to know what your thoughts would be in terms of long term issue and scalability there. Would it essentially be direct funding like you just described for your journal? Well, our journal is financed by the university. We won one position, a manager, not my position as editor, I'm faculty member. And we get a $30,000 a year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And so that's where we get our funding. Now, the whole problem of funding and sustainability to me is very simple, but it's very difficult to get there. And the simple thing is that let's take one-tenth of the money that we're giving to the monopoly publishers and use that money to support open access and then use the nine-tenths that we save and put it into educating students, lower tuition or whatever and helping students. But a lot of people don't understand this, but the monopoly educational publishing industry is the most profitable industry in the world. Last year Elsevier, 36% Google net profit, yes, 26% for Google and Microsoft about 15%. Like it is they are making a fortune off of us because we give them everything for free and we give them our labor for free and then they sell it back to us. This is, to me, this is unsustainable. People talk about the sustainability of academic publishing. This is unsustainable. And so we have to work at it. And it's a very simple response is let's take some of that money and start supporting open access journals. And I believe there was a movement in the United States among librarians to start that process. I hope it continues. Thank you. We might be running a bit short on time. So if we could do your presentation and then we'll have some questions. Yeah, I'd rather answer people's questions and what they're concerned about. But I'll go in and I'm sure some of the concerns of people are in the slides as well. So I've already mentioned about a Rodel being a diamond open access and about the fight that we had with Shirk. And we are scopus. And so, yes, we are in the list of journals that that are accepted by universities around the world. You generally have to get into a scopus as in order for them to recognize. In many countries, they are pushing very heavily. They say, I've heard it so many times in developing countries, you must publish three articles a year in scopus journals. And to me, I don't know anyone in our field who publishes three articles a year in scopus journals. It's just absurd, but they are under pressure to do that. And so we're getting a huge number of articles being submitted that are just not of the not of a good quality. And we now have only a 10 percent acceptance rate for we get about a well over a thousand a year. And we publish only 40 articles a year. So there are some of the statistics you can see there. And here's a good diagram from Wikipedia on what diamond open access is. So you can see that it's free for all authors. It's free for the readers. It's peer reviewed and the authors retain copyright. And others like the gold open access, as you can see, is not it's not free if you have to pay an article processing charge. And it could be. It could be gold and not pay an article processes charge, but we're calling that diamond in any case. Some other journals besides the road, if your topic is open, open educational resources are open practice and international council for distance education journal. The International Journal of Open Educational Resources and a new journal that's just coming out the Journal of Open Educational Resources in higher education. Or you can look up the directory of open access journals and in there, 24 of 26 journals on open and distance education topics have no publication fees. So there's a wide variety there. Unfortunately, many of them are not scopus. And when it comes to tenure and promotion, some faculties look on that very seriously. The articles published under open select with Taylor and Francis get 95% more citations. So when they're open, you do get more citations and a lot more tenure and promotion committees are looking very strongly at the citations for your articles. And you get seven times as many downloads in open select in that one. So standard article publishing charges are around nearly $3,000. So again, we should avoid using them all together. I'd like to point out if your studies are about open education resources, we have together a repository of articles and reports focusing on open education on all different aspects of open education. And there's now nearly 3,000 records by thousands of authors, and it's a very good place to start if you're doing research on any topic related to open education. Now I'm going to get into some of the ditty gritty of writing a scholarly article. And this is not for the excellent writers. If you're an excellent writer, you can break all the rules and still get published. I'm not an excellent writer. I have been published, but I've done it by following some of these rules. And about rejections, I've been rejected as an author many times, more times than I wish to remember. I didn't cry all the time, but I did cry sometimes when I was rejected. And I'm an editor and I reject people all the time, and it hurts, it does hurt me. But Victoria Ray gave a very good, simple and succinct view of writing a scholarly article, and I've adapted it because I don't fully agree with her. Of course, I don't fully agree with anybody, so that's one of my problems my wife tells me. But there's a basic structure, an introduction, a literature review, a theoretical framework, a case study if it is a case study, if not maybe an example, they've got the data, the methodology, the results, discussion and conclusion. Now, before submitting, this is something that bothers anybody who's an editor of a journal, is read several articles in the journal, get an idea of what is being accepted. I mean, really, you can tell somebody submits an article that they've never looked at anything in there. And then check the style of the journal, is it APA or Modern Language, Chicago, whatever the style is, and submit it in that style. And it saves you time because our manager just looks at it, it's not an AP, we do APA, and we send it back to you. And then some will send it back in another style. No, it has to be an APA style. And we got one complaint from a guy, I said, well, if I send it to you in that, I have to change it to that style, and then I have to go to another journal, I have to change it to that style. And so they want us to do all the changing, all the work of changing the style rather than doing it themselves. But there are solutions to that, and I'll come to that in a minute. Read the submission requirements. We have other requirements, not just APA style, read them. Hey, you know, that'll get you somewhere. Check the word limit. And if there's a word limit, try to stick to it. And oh, you never, never submit two journals at the same time. This is a real no-no. And in our field, I know editors of different journals around, and we know who is doing that, and you get blacklisted. There are blacklists. We do not accept people who send it to two journals at the same time. So don't do that, please. Now, for those who, like the gentleman who complained to me about having to change the style, we recommended to him to use a reference manager. And as you can see here, there are all kinds of reference managers out there. And you can change the style. I can change a style from APA to IEEE like this, like this. And then you have to clean it up a little bit, but the basic style is changed. And so you can do that with a wide variety of different reference management tools. And for those who are sticking to open source, and I recommend it, is there are a lot of open source reference managers. They're not all high cost, and they're very good. And so if you're doing graduate work or research of any kind, and you're not using a reference manager, grow up. I mean, it makes life so much easier for you and for the people you deal with. What do reference managers do? Well, number one, in our situation, number one for you is you format the paper in different styles so as you can easily resubmit to different journals because you are going to get rejected at some point and you are going to think, gee, maybe I can get it into another journal. Rewrite it based on the criticism you get and send it to another journal. It may be if it's the same style, that's wonderful. If it isn't, get your reference manager and press the button. You can also insert, annotate, and organize your citations very simply. You can create bibliographies, and also they warn you of unintentional plagiarism if you're using too much of somebody else's work. You can share references with people. People ask me sometimes, do you have any references? People, I say, mainly my students, of course they are people. They ask for sharing references, so I go to my reference manager and I go through, click, yeah, that's available. I just copy, paste them, send them off. It's very easy to do. And, of course, there's a grammar aid of great importance, not just to English second language learners, but to English people too. Some of our worst articles are written by native English speakers. So it's not just about people, but English is a second language. How did I do that? So you come to your paper, finally you start off with an introduction. Something really simple, and it's surprising how many do not do this, is state the problem. If you have previous work on it, come out and say it right at the beginning. And then how are you going to address the problem? And then what are the implications for the field of study of open education? Very simple things to do at the beginning. The literature view. The first thing you've got to show that you've read the relevant literature. And on both sides, if you're a proponent of one opinion, you just show that you've read all the people who share your opinion. You must show what other opinions on it are that may be contradictory to yours and may be nice to put in an explanation of why you don't agree with them. And I've seen this a lot with the learning styles. There's a big debate on learning styles. If you are supporting learning styles, they'll send a long paper with 20 citations supporting learning styles. And they don't mention any of the 20 or 100 citations that are against learning styles. You can go either way. I think there's something to learning style, but I don't think there's a lot to it. I think there's something to it that's worth it. Again, you have to show both sides of the situation. If there are foundational texts, you should have them in there on the subject that you're writing about. But you also must have the most recent and relevant papers. One of the biggest reasons for rejecting papers is that they say that the references are too old. And that usually tells us that this is about the fourth time round coming to our journal because then they haven't updated the references to the recent years. Explain how papers are relevant in your submission. So some just go through a long list, but they don't explain why they're relevant to the research they're doing in this particular paper. And identify gaps in the literature and say that no one has written about this or I wouldn't use the word no one, say very few people or it has not been, you want to hedge a little bit sometimes when you're making those statements. A theoretical framework. Another reason for rejection when people don't put their paper into a theoretical framework demonstrate that you understand relevant theories. Show how the relevant theories are in your paper. Explain your theoretical assumptions. And especially if you don't agree with some of the relevant theories, just explain why. And a lot of us don't agree with relevant theories. Which key variables are the important ones? Another way of helping to clarify your paper is give an example. It's a useful background to your paper. It can to illustrate a principle or thesis. Give an example of what you're talking about. These examples can clarify points to be made. I mean your whole paper could be a case study and then that's an example. But if it isn't, just a short one paragraph or two paragraph example helps to clarify things. Data and the methods. Explain what information you're using. Statistics, documents, interviews. What are you doing? Where is the information coming from? And how did you analyze the information? And really important in putting out the results. This is the meat of the paper. The data must be based on the research conducted in your paper. And people come up with all kinds of things. One of the worst things we're getting, and I'm getting a lot of them, and I blame it on an overemphasis on learner centeredness, is we're getting all kinds of papers where they say, oh, our students, we did a survey and they all agree that they collaborated. They were all satisfied. They say that their self-efficacy improved. And they don't put anything in there, even about what subject was being taught or whether the students learned anything or not. And we point them to our advice to the authors where we say, this is a journal about learning. We don't care if the students are satisfied. We don't care if they're self-efficacious. We don't care if they collaborate unless it leads to learning. So you have to put in there that they've learned something or you have some data in your paper that some learning occurred while you were doing all this. I'm not against students being satisfied. This is wonderful, but if they're satisfied and they didn't learn anything, yeah, I have a problem with that. I'm an educator. My job is to make sure that when they come into my class for the first time, by the time they leave, something has gone in between the ears. Something, they know something that they didn't know before. They have a skill that they didn't know before. And if they're satisfied, wonderful, if they collaborated to do it, this is really great. And if it made them more self-efficacious or whatever other opinion they have in your survey, these are wonderful things, but they're only wonderful in our paper, in our journal, as if they learned something. Some of them, maybe they should send it to a psychology paper where all the students were happy. That's important for psychology, maybe educational psychology, but not in the learning journal. So the data must speak to the problem that you posed and you need to organize results analytically and not chronologically. So you have to put your analysis together in that way. In the conclusion and discussion, you need to reflect on the broader implications of your results, summarize the findings, note the limitations of your study, and future research suggestions. And I'll tell you, if you took these things and just put them in a line and then filled in what it is for your paper, you've got a good standard paper. And I suggest that if you're not a good writer, like me, I'm not a good writer. I've been told that a few times. I have been published. I have been rejected a lot. I did say that. I didn't say that I do. I have been published. Some people have asked, you know, what kind of reviews to do. And I have 14 doctoral students. So they often ask me, what can I do? Human research is very difficult. So I've advised some of them to do it. I don't want it to go overboard all around the world, but systematic reviews are getting a good success rate these days where you go in and you take a look at different journals and you come up with a theme and you do a review on that theme and you come out with some conclusions and recommendations from them. And so I'd recommend that you look at those. It's a good way to start. These are some of the good ones that I have on here. But with that, I'll finish off and open it up for more questions. Hi, I'm DiGrafiz from the International University of La Rioja. And I'm going to jump straight back into where we were before the slides. I'm sorry. Because I very much agree with the opposition on publishing and publishers. I'm wondering what actions we need to take, not only as individuals saying, no, we're not going to pay these fees, but as a community and as education systems. What's the agenda for reform for us? And you think I might have an answer. I think we need to... Well, I mentioned the initiative of the librarians in the United States of starting in a small way to say that this amount of money is for open access and it's 4% this year. Next year it'll be 8%. Next year it'll be 12%. Initiatives like that are great. For me, I don't review for journals that are not open access. I will not review for them. I'm not giving them the pleasure of my labor. And I won't say that. I said I won't review unless you pay me. But they won't pay you. They'll take your money, but they won't give you the money back. That's for sure. So that's an individual way. And I don't... Having said I don't publish in non-diamond journals or none, I have from time to time as a co-author worked with people and done that. It's pretty hard to be really strictly principled on it. I wouldn't... I mean, good luck if you can be really principled and not do it at all. But sometimes you work with... I work with younger authors and it's important that they get published in this journal and sometimes I don't 100% adhere to it, but I try to do it in general. Yeah, thank you. Maybe I can elaborate a little bit on that because I think that's the main issue. I have a few words about me. I'm a university librarian at the University of Lille in France. I'm sitting on a French board for open access. And I'm also the vice president of the Liber League, so the League of Research in Europe. So I'm very happy to hear your position on what you said. So I'll elaborate a little bit on your question. I think that what probably we should do is sustain more bibliodiversity in the landscape. I know that a lot of... a big part of a system with transformative agreements with APCs and so on are based on the gold open access. We've a central role of publishers just like Springer, Wiley, Elsevier and so on. What we want to foster and to sustain is more bibliodiversity, so meaning sustaining the green model where we put on archives, just like archives, for instance, where the mathematicians put their preprints, you mentioned it, and also the diamond model you have mentioned. You talked a little bit about the report that has been sustained by Coalition S in Europe, made by operators and other partners. So I think this is a good way to try to introduce new models of publication. We are not alone on that. Europe has a central position in this league, but South America also. So I would really be very much in favor of... we start between North and America, Europe and South and America to build something in common. And maybe that's one of the solutions. Because you know Europe, in terms of publishing, is number one. North America is number two, and South and America is quite important. So if we work all together in that direction, then we change the model. That's the first thing. And the second thing, which is maybe even more important, is to change the assessment system of the research. That's the central issue. In many disciplines, we have promotions to tenure positions based on impact factor. That's the reality. So as long as the system is not changed, we will keep having the same problems. So again, that is the moment for that. Because we have started an initiative in Europe to try to reform this assessment system. And we hope that again, we will be numerous, not only Europe, but North and America, South and America and other people to change the model, not to rely on, I need to publish in high level impact factor journals. I need to publish 10, 15 articles a year. What is it about 15 articles a year? You cannot publish good articles with 15 articles a year. So if we change the assessment system, then we may be able to have a different landscape and a different way of publishing and of driving our research community. So I guess that is the moment now. So I'm very happy again to hear that it's something which is tackled in conferences like OE Global. Yes, I agree that the tenure and promotion system, well, it highly favors those established journals. And that is exactly why they can charge huge fees for their databases to our libraries, is for that exact reason that we must have them in the libraries and faculty need them in order to get promoted. And so we have to change that. I think I just have to mention that the time is well over our slot and we are streaming, so it might become a bit awkward. Maybe if there are any questions, Professor McGraw will be happy to field them. I think that we should just wrap up the session and say what a wonderful contribution this has been to OE Global and give the presenters a round of applause. If there are any questions, I mean it's an open education conference, please engage, participate and collaborate. Thank you, enjoy the lunch.