Crag Hill
February 16, 2021
Crag Hill is an Associate Professor for the Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum department in the Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education. He is the editor and co-founder of Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature, an open access journal published by OU Libraries, and author of the openly published article From Bootstraps to Hands-up: A Multicultural Content Analysis of The Depiction of Poverty in Young Adult Literature.
How much did you know about open access before you started publishing openly?
In the last ten years I have received almost daily email queries to contribute to an open-access journal—all from journals outside my field of expertise. Those all-too persistent queries—academic spam—initially dimmed my view of open-access publishing.
On top of that, in my academic unit at a previous university, open-access journals, even if rigorously peer-reviewed, carried far less weight than established journals. I understood their argument: open-access journals could lose support or interest and fold (many have, including one I published in); scholarship would disappear and have no impact (ya know, impact factor).
How have you benefited from publishing open access?
Along with publishing research on comics and the depiction of young adult literature in open-access journals, I have been co-editor of an open-access journal at OU for five years. So my research interests have been enhanced through this platform, but even more so my reach, my/our network has grown exponentially. Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature has played an important role in the growth of critical and empirical research into all aspects of young adult literature.
Did you experience any challenges publishing open access, and if so, describe them?
As alluded to above, there still is a stigma around publishing in open-access journals. This continues to be a challenge for Study and Scrutiny. We were working on a guest-edited issue that would include research by BIPOC scholars on young adult literature. We had initial interest in this project, but then pre-tenure BIPOC scholars were concerned that publishing in an open-access journal would not meet the bar set by their institutions, often set higher for them in Research 1 institutions than for non-BIPOC faculty.
Do you feel like you received the support you need from OU Libraries when you published?
From the beginning, Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature has received all the support we have asked for. Recently, the most gratifying support is the research OU Libraries has gathered to support open-access journals, including evidence that articles published in open-access journals are gaining more citations than articles behind a paywall. That kind of data puts a capital A in Access, a critical issue as the production and consumption of knowledge moves more and more into digital spaces. We think the stigma associated with these platforms will dissolve.
Other journals are always open access without cost to the author. For Indigenous scholarship, the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC) journal has an exemplary approach to publication. All articles are published open access and copyright resides at all times with the named author/s and if noted their community/family/society (https://winhec.org/journal). I look forward to more publishers honoring Indigenous protocols for knowledge sharing through their publication practices.