Open and Shut: Open Access in Hybrid Educational Technology Journals 2010 – 2017

Authors: Eamon Costello, Tom Farrelly, Tony Murphy

Little is known about open access publishing in educational technology journals that employ a hybrid model which charges authors only if they wish to publish via gold open access.

In this study we sought to address this gap in the scholarly understanding of open access publishing in hybrid journals that publish research into the intersection of education and technology.

We analysed three categories of article access types: gold, green, and limited access, and collected data on their prevalence in the seven-year period from 2010-2017 across 29 journals.

Data was gathered from Scopus, Unpaywall, Sherpa RoMEO, and via manual searches of the journal websites, resulting in a dataset comprising the metadata of 8,479 articles.

Our findings highlight that most research remains locked behind paywalls, that open access publishing through legal means is a minority activity for the scholars involved, and that the complexity and costs of legal open access publishing in these journals may be inhibiting the accessibility of research to readers.

URL : Open and Shut: Open Access in Hybrid Educational Technology Journals 2010 – 2017

DOI : https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i5.4383

Determining Textbook Cost, Formats, and Licensing with Google Books API: A Case Study from an Open Textbook Project

Authors : Eamon Costello, Richard Bolger, Tiziana Soverino, Mark Brown

The rising cost of textbooks for students has been highlighted as a major concern in higher education, particularly in the US and Canada. Less has been reported, however, about the costs of textbooks outside of North America, including in Europe.

We address this gap in the knowledge through a case study of one Irish higher education institution, focusing on the cost, accessibility, and licensing of textbooks. We report here on an investigation of textbook prices drawing from an official college course catalog containing several thousand books.

We detail how we sought to determine metadata of these books including: the formats they are available in, whether they are in the public domain, and the retail prices.

We explain how we used methods to automatically determine textbook costs using Google Books API and make our code and dataset publicly available.

URL : Determining Textbook Cost, Formats, and Licensing with Google Books API: A Case Study from an Open Textbook Project

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v38i1.10738