David McLeod
December 1, 2022
David McLeod, Ph.D., is Associate Director and Associate Professor of the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work at the University of Oklahoma. He holds affiliate faculty status with the OU Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, the OU Center for Social Justice, and the Ruth Knee Institute for Transformative Scholarship. Additionally, he is the President-Elect of the National Organization of Forensic Social Work and Chair of the Oklahoma Children of Incarcerated Parents Advisory Committee to the Legislature.
Dr. McLeod’s research focuses on neuroscience, female sexual offending, trauma, domestic violence, and social work education, among other subjects, and he has earned numerous teaching, service, and research awards, including the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work “Professor of the Year” award, for which he is a four-time recipient.
He is also very engaged in a range of open initiatives. For example, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Forensic Social Work, a peer-reviewed, open access journal formerly published behind a paywall but now available for free through OU Libraries. Additionally, he has utilized subvention funding from OU Libraries to publish his research openly, including the articles “Intimate Partner Violence: Innovations in Theory to Inform Clinical Practice, Policy, and Research” and “Modernized female sex offender typologies: Intrapsychic, behavioral, and trauma related domains.” More recently, he has been exploring open educational resources, including converting to teaching with an open access book.
How much did you know about open access publishing before you started publishing openly?
To be fair, I started following and learning more about open access probably around 2012 or so. At that time, a group of scholars from around the world had come together and created a movement to protest the paywalls with the Elsevier publishing platform. It was an exciting time for scholars. We were bringing to question the ethics of restricting access to knowledge, and I was intrigued by it. As someone who publishes for the sake of reducing violence in our communities, I know that the people who need to see my work the most will likely not be able to pay $45 for access to one journal article. So, I started exploring open access then. Part of the problem for me at that time was as a junior academic, I still had a great deal of fear that my work wouldn't be seen as legitimate (in university structures) if I didn't publish in traditional spaces. I was caught between that and a fear that without the platform of the academy my work would have even less of a chance of making it to public consumption. Thankfully over the past ten years, the perspective of suspicion regarding legitimacy regarding OA has dwindled. People are learning about its rigor, legitimacy, and impact.
How do you think open access supports diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts?
I think this is the most crucial part of open access. The internet allows us to share and disseminate information in prolific ways, which has real-world implications. We live in a post-truth era by some metrics, and the information transmitted online is often not rooted in empirical knowledge development. To address this, scientific knowledge must be accessible to everyone, and open access gives us that opportunity. It empowers anyone with a cell phone or access to a public library to be able to find information that could be vital to an individual, organizational, or community well-being.
Have you seen a difference in the engagement of your readership since making your journal open (vs. when it was behind a paywall)?
I think there's an absolute difference. It's a difference that presents itself in multiple ways. On the one hand, the information is open and accessible, and available to anyone who can click a link. But there's an important thing happening in the background as well. As an organization, we can make a stand with an open access journal. By investing our time, energy, and social capital into this project, we can say that the human good is more important than the bottom line. With this, we can communicate the particular topics of each piece of scholarship and the overarching theme that we value people and believe everyone should have access to knowledge no matter where you come from or what resources you have available to you. That's a pretty powerful thing to be able to do.
How has utilizing open educational resources (OER) helped your pedagogical goals?
I've been interested in the application of freely available resources in learning activities and content delivery in the past decade. From online videos to websites, to utilizing curation practices for students to investigate specific topics, to creating wikis or toolkits, or learning how to build websites or create infographics, I've been highly engaged in using web-based tools to help students learn how to access, engage with, and share information. It's been exciting over the past few years as open education resources have become more openly accessible and legitimized. It's not that these resources weren't good before, but it is that now they have become more accepted. We must create spaces where students can take what they've learned in the university and apply it confidently in the community, and acceptance is part of that. I've recently transitioned to a completely open access textbook for my statistics course, which was easily integrated into the Canvas modules. Not only is the book free, but it's broken up in a way that makes it slightly different from traditional textbooks while delivering the same content. I believe the digital space allows us to organize content for educational purposes in unique ways more aligned with knowledge consumption practices of people in learning communities in 2022. We live in a different world and have access to information in different ways, so the idea that the professor is the only one with access to knowledge is antiquated. What I seek to do, particularly with open educational resources, is demonstrate how students can develop a practice of identifying knowledge and learning how to assess what parts of it are trustworthy. I’m not the gatekeeper, I’m an experienced tour guide—someone to keep them safe and show the way.
Do you feel like you receive the support you need from OU Libraries for the various open access projects you are involved with?
OU Libraries have been instrumental in my success with open access at OU. Point blank. Not just in supporting the work in what is said, but in the practices of the library itself. For example, OU Libraries personnel took on an extensive workload to help me transition the Journal of Forensic Social Work (www.JoFSW.org) from Taylor and Francis to an open-source format published here at OU. I could not have done that by myself, and it not only benefits me but it also benefits my community of scholars and practitioners who serve across the globe in forensic social work. I have utilized OU Libraries’ subvention funding to help me publish in reputable spaces where processing and publication fees were needed to maintain the quality of a journal. And OU Libraries has supported my development and restructuring of course, specifically to utilize open access educational materials. I have found with OU Libraries not only a philosophical partnership, but also an incredibly supportive and helpful system.