Students: The Forgotten Stakeholders?

I've been reading more about copyright recently, and many of the discussions have focused on the problems of proliferating stakeholders and outdated legal frameworks in the e-access era. For a concise examination of these issues, I highly recommend Dorothea Salo's article Who owns our work?, as referenced by Duke University's Kevin Smith.

The idea of the many 'players' in the realms of copyright and access led me to thinking about who might be getting left out of the discussion. There has been plenty written (and drawn) about how institutions and authors suffer when copyright is applied to restrict access and re-use, and I am painfully aware of the impact on librarians...but how about those humble readers?

That is, the students.

Maybe it's because I've been out of the undergrad world for a while, but I don't remember hearing much about open access in the student realm. And even at my graduate school, while there was a dedicated team of librarians promoting open access in the GSLIS program, that effort never seemed to transfer over to the 'rest' of the college programs.

And that's a shame. I think it's important that we get students involved in OA, for several reasons.

First, I'm approaching this from the paradigm of colleges/universities as institutions that 'produce learning.'^

Sure, 'learning' may not be at the very top of every undergrad's priorities list, but let's say there's a good number of students who want to investigate and grow and contribute in their fields of interest (bless them!).

Even on the most basic level, the copyright/access bind causes a problem. Because Joe Awesome may want to write a fantastic research paper on the ethical implications of genetic testing for hereditary disease, but his results are limited by his resources. To use a recipe metaphor: if your ingredients aren't top quality, you're probably not going to be winning America's Top Chef.

So, restricted access means a lower quality resource pool, which impacts the student 'output.'

More devastating, I think, is the impact on the student's attitude towards research and scholarship. I cannot stand that moment when I'm at the Reference Desk with a student, and they see that perfect article, and they click on it only to find -- No Access. Subscription Required. And to have that happen again and again....*

It seems that instead of the 'instant access' playground that the e-publishing model promises, most students are being thrown into an online obstacle course that saps all motivation and patience.

This is especially painful as students, along with everyone else, are markedly short on Time and Money. There may be a perfect source behind that access wall, but many students aren't willing to Wait or Pay, and so the opportunity is lost (and some resentment is likely gained).

This exclusion is also damaging in a more subtle way; blocked student access to research hinders our attempts to get them involved in our scholarly communities on campus and in departments. Instead of opportunities for creation, assignments become taxing exercises producing student work that, too often, ends up tossed out at the end of the semester or quietly degrading in the corner of a hard drive.

An alternative model, with engaged students actively creating content that is then hosted and preserved by the library, shared and re-used among departments and throughout successive classes -- that seems like a much closer step towards the 'community resource' that these library repositories are supposed to be. Professors and researchers may be reluctant to deposit their work for various professional and/or monetary reasons; students may lack these mental roadblocks. And with access to quality research to draw from, there's no reason that they can't produce some really fantastic projects and papers that will enrich the whole community.**

So that's why I was encouraged to discover groups like the Right to Research Coalition, and unsurprised (yet also delighted) to see that the largest organization of medical students in the world has teamed up with them. Because medical students definitely value timely access to quality research.

I'm hoping to see more examples of this on specific campuses, and would love to hear of any movements/groups for OA on the student level. My comments are always open!

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^See Robert B. Barr and John Tagg's "A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education"

*A caveat: Thanks to our Amazing Interlibrary Loan Librarian, this does not happen very often at all. And in the medical field, where prices are steep and budgets are flat, that is impressive.

**Within reason of ability and academic experience - I'm not saying you should expect thesis-level work from Joe Awesome the Freshman (no matter how Awesome he is).