Open Data is the name given to datasets which have been generated by international organisations, governments, NGOs and academic researchers, and made freely available online and openly-licensed. These datasets can be used by educators as Open Educational Resources (OER) to support different teaching and learning activities, allowing students to gain experience working with the same raw data researchers and policy-makers generate and use. In this way, educators can facilitate students to understand how information is generated, processed, analysed and interpreted.This paper offers an initial exploration of ways in which the use of Open Data can be key in the development of transversal skills (including digital and data literacies, alongside skills for critical thinking, research, teamwork, and global citizenship), enhancing students' abilities to understand and select information sources, to work with, curate, analyse and interpret data, and to conduct and evaluate research. This paper also presents results of an exploratory survey that can guide further research into Open Data-led learning activities. Our goal is to support educators in empowering students to engage, critically and collaboratively, as 21st century global citizens.
Scholars are increasingly being asked to share teaching materials, publish in open access journals, network in social media, and reuse open educational resources (OER). The theoretical benefits of Open Educational Practices (OEP) have become understood in the academic community but thus far, the use of OER has not been rapidly adopted. We aim to understand the challenges academics face with in attempting to adopt OEP, and identify whether these are related to or stem from the functionalities afforded by current repositories of OER (ROER). By understanding what academics and experts consider good practices, we can develop guidelines for quality in the development of ROER. In this article we present the findings from a study surveying academics using OER and experts who develop and/or work with ROER. We conclude by suggesting a framework to enhance the development and quality of ROER.
'Predatory publishing' refers to conditions under which gold open access academic publishers claim to conduct peer review and charge for their publishing services but do not, in fact, actually perform such reviews. Most prominently exposed in recent years by Jeffrey Beall, the phenomenon garners much media attention. In this article, we acknowledge that such practices are deceptive but then examine, across a variety of stakeholder groups, what the harm is from such actions to each group of actors. We find that established publishers have a strong motivation to hype claims of predation as damaging to the scholarly and scientific endeavour while noting that, in fact, systems of peer review are themselves already acknowledged as deeply flawed.
Keywords: Open Access, Scholarly Communications, Predatory Publishing, Evaluative Cultures, AcademiaAcknowledgement: The authors wish to thank Ross Mounce and David Prosser for helpful comments on the manuscript of this article. Parts of this article on the problems of peer review are derived from and share a narrative with a chapter by Eve that is currently under submission.
Researchers have turned to comics as outputs incorporating their research findings. These comics are print and/or online publications that can lead to the wider adoption of research and enhance educational practices, widen public engagement, and improve the possibilities for research to influence public policy. This article presents an interview with Professor Katy Vigurs about Higher Fees, Higher Debts: Greater Expectations of Graduate Futures?, a comic based on a research report produced for the Society for Research into Higher Education (2016). In order to contextualize the interview, this article also provides an introduction to non-fiction comics research, and concludes with reflections on comics as a way of doing research. This article seeks to document and encourage further knowledge-exchange between the higher education sector and comics practitioners, and between researchers using comics in their research or as a means to disseminate their own research and those scholars who research comics as their main object of study.
This dataset contains the full text transcripts from 15 semi-structured interviews (approximately 44,100 words) conducted during November and December 2014 with participants involved in various aspects of the process of health-related comics production. These participants are authors and publishers and their work is publicly recognised in the comics community. The dataset has been deposited in the Open Health Data Dataverse repository as a zipped folder containing 15 individual simple text files corresponding to each interview and a ReadMe file containing contextual information and other metadata. An initial domain analysis of the interviews was published as Farthing, A., & Priego, E.
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