Permanent link for Open With Purpose: How can Open Access empower students to share their scholarly work? on October 20, 2020

Students are scholars. The journey from consumer to creator of new academic information is a core part of higher education, especially at universities like Grand Valley. Every semester, Lakers run experiments, analyze topics from new perspectives, collaborate to tackle community challenges, and thoughtfully explore important social issues. 

The collections of student work in ScholarWorks@GVSU, Grand Valley’s Open Access repository, highlight the wide variety of Lakers’ scholarly works. Many students in the Frederick Meijer Honors College choose to share their final Honors projects, like a Laker Survival Guide aimed at first-generation GVSU students or an artistic exploration of how nurses are portrayed in popular culture. Meanwhile, Lakers’ graduate theses, including a study on Swearing in a Second Language and timely work on Students’ Motivations and Barriers to Online Education, have been downloaded nearly 1.5 million times by readers in almost every country on Earth.

Unfortunately, the subscription model of scholarly publishing offers relatively few pathways for students to share this work. Because paywalled journals must compete for limited subscription revenue, they’re more likely to focus on the most potentially-exciting research, on work from established scholars, and on traditional types of research articles. Even when student-authored works are published in subscription journals, the audience is limited to people whose institutions subscribe to those journals—and with budget cuts at almost every university, no one can afford to subscribe to everything. The alternative is paying for each article individually, often at $30 or more.

ScholarWorks@GVSU is a publishing model which can amplify student voices that might otherwise be excluded. Student work shared here can be limited to the GVSU community or made available to readers around the world—and readers around the world are often very interested in Lakers’ innovative ideas, critical analysis, and original research.

This summer, for example, we recorded over 34,000 downloads of a 2014 opinion editorial in ScholarWorks@GVSU, as U.S. protests against racial injustice and police brutality led many to echo the student author’s question, Why is it that so Many White People Fear Black Men? U.S. readers account for about two thirds of these, with May – September 2020 seeing more international downloads than the total recorded over six years since the editorial first appeared online in College Student Affairs Leadership, a student and faculty publication from GVSU’s College of Education, currently on hiatus.

In the traditional, paywalled system of scholarly publishing, most of these works would remain silent, largely unread except by the student authors and their professors. Through Open Access, Lakers’ hard work, insights, and voices can reach interested readers around the world.

Posted on Permanent link for Open With Purpose: How can Open Access empower students to share their scholarly work? on October 20, 2020.