What you can read should not depend on where you work – why ALT is making its peer-reviewed journal Open Access

The Association for Learning Technology functions partly as a learned society. As such we have a peer-reviewed journal Research in Learning Technology which is currently published by Routledge.

Individual members of ALT receive Research in Learning Technology in print as an entitlement of membership. Organisational subscribers to the journal (including ALT’s 250 organisational and sponsoring members) get the journal in print; and their staff (and students) can access the journal online as well, if some not entirely simple technical steps are taken to connect the subscribing organisation’s network to the systems of our publisher.

Under this traditional publishing model the research contained in our journal – much of it oriented to practitioners – is only available to a tiny subset of those who could potentially use it. Either a user has to join ALT, or their employer has to join ALT; or the employer has to subscribe to the journal with the publisher, costing upwards of £200/year.

Last year ALT’s Trustees, after a thorough competitive tendering process, took the decision to switch the journal’s publication model. From January 2012 we will be publishing Research in Learning Technology in partnership with the Swedish company Co-Action Publishing, as an Open Access product, with the entire back catalogue and all future issues freely available on the Web.

School teachers, educational technologists in the private sector, FE staff, and others (including journalists!), who do not have the convenient online access that is the norm in most of UK academia, will have easy access to our journal, from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection, without the inconvenience of having to login.

Why have we done this? Of course we want individuals and organisations to continue to join ALT; but our charitable object is to advance education through increasing, exploring and disseminating knowledge in the field of learning technology for the benefit of the general public. Our journal is one of the vehicles for this; but the general public can only access it if they pay!

Secondly, ALT has a service ethos: we want to help drive up standards of teaching and learning. Putting publicly funded research into the public domain fits in with this ethos.

Finally, the world of scholarly publishing is changing fast, with new Open Access journals springing up (some with large resources behind them, especially in the STEM field), and others considering the switch. We decided to be at the front of this sea change in publishing methods rather then being a late adopter.

To help other organisations review their journal publishing arrangements, we’ve summarised our own experience in making the switch to Open Access in Journal tendering for societies: a brief guide. In keeping with the spirit of the times, this guide is itself Open Access, and available for download from our Open Access repository.

Perhaps the University and College Union (UCU) will now take up the challenge and change the publishing model for its well-regarded Journal of Further and Higher Education (JFHE).

Seb Schmoller is chief executive of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), an independent membership charity whose mission is to ensure that use of learning technology is effective and efficient, informed by research and practice, and grounded in an understanding of the underlying technologies and their capabilities, and the situations into which they are placed