Temporary Free Access

Abstract

Many universities rapidly transitioned to online instruction in the spring of 2020, and content providers responded by offering temporary free access to a wide range of sources. Despite having no direct cost, free access comes with several hidden costs, including the staff time used to manage temporary access. With many campuses expecting online instruction to continue at least through the end of the year, teaching faculty and library staff now have to build solutions for online learning without the resources that got them through the spring. While transitioning to Open Educational Resources and Open Access publications may take a large effort upfront to redesign courses and workflows, being able to rely on permanent access would be a significant advantage.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• free trials
• Open Access
• Open Educational Resources
• Open Textbooks

Introduction

There is plenty of discussion in open movements of the various ways something can be free. Open access (OA) advocates have many different labels for different colors of OA, including gold, green, platinum, and diamond (Open Access Belgium, n.d.), and there is the distinction between gratis OA, which removes access barriers, and libre OA, which removes permission barriers (Suber, 2008). There is also a discussion of whether open source software is most similar to free speech, free beer, or free puppies (Branscombe, 2015). That is, open source can be thought of as removing restrictions, offering something with no payment required, or further, offering something with no payment required but significant obligations for care. The message shared by all these discussions is that free resources and services may come with limits and opportunity costs and may require significant labor for setup and maintenance. Free resources have their drawbacks, and different kinds of free resources may present different benefits and challenges. This column suggests that relying on temporary free access to commercial resources is an approach that will present more challenges than embracing fully open resources.

Publisher responses to COVID-19

In early March, the University of Washington became the first major American University to cancel in-person classes due to COVID-19 (Thomason, 2020), and many others soon followed suit. Across the country, faculty members hastily moved courses online, and plenty of them found it difficult to offer online versions of courses that relied on lab work, included screenings of films, or assumed there would be access to print resources in libraries. While current journal collections at academic libraries are primarily electronic and uptake of ebook and streaming video offerings have grown in recent years, most libraries cannot offer everything electronically. In some cases, this may be due to the unavailability of institutional licensing options, as is often the case with textbooks (University of Guelph Library, 2020). In other cases, resources may not fit into a library’s budget, or library patrons may express a preference for print materials. Whatever the case, many instructors needed to find replacement resources or consider restructuring their courses, while students that had relied on textbooks or other physical course reserves in libraries were left without access to course materials.

Publishers, aggregators, and other content providers responded by offering temporary free access to many resources. This included platforms like De Gruyter and JSTOR offering access to books from several publishers, JoVE and SAGE opening their video products, scientific publishers creating freely accessible collections of COVID-19 articles (Ex Libris, 2020), and textbook platforms like RedShelf and VitalSource providing limited free access.¹ It seemed each vendor offered a slightly different model. In some cases, free access was automatically enabled for all users, while others operated more like a traditional free trial that had to be requested and restricted to an IP address range. End dates for free access ranged from April through July or even beyond. Some packages were easy to activate in a link resolver or discovery tool while others required loading a set of machine readable catalog (MARC) records or did not provide title-level access at all. Some even required additional logins for individual users.

Stumbling blocks

All of this variation in free offers made for management challenges for libraries that decided to provide access widely. A. Scarlet Galvan (2020) described the situation clearly: “It’s tempting to turn it all on and forget about it, but that isn’t how crisis management, content management, or library ecosystems function. ‘Free for COVID’ does not mean appropriate for every institution by default, and it still costs the library in terms of labor and expertise to evaluate and maintain.” Librarians that chose to activate and promote large numbers of resources often found themselves maintaining webpages, guides, database lists, knowledgebases, and discovery tools with temporary access. Often the access dates changed during the term of the free access, creating the need to revisit the same resources. As with any trial, there were authentication and access hurdles. Managing any kind of free electronic resources can take staff time, but resources with limitations and strings attached are especially difficult.

Managing access and promoting these resources to other library staff and teaching faculty was a considerable time commitment. It also became clear that many campuses would be maintaining online instruction past the spring semester (Hubler, 2020). While maintaining access to temporarily free resources may have presented a service to faculty and students who were suddenly forced into online courses, it also meant that neither library staff nor faculty were fully dedicated to building long-term solutions that would be needed at least through the fall.

It is completely understandable that faculty would take advantage of temporary access to maintain their existing readings and resources. However, this approach has left many faculty in the position of rethinking their courses yet again for a new semester without this access. Libraries will be pushing into new territory in the fall with significantly reduced budgets, making a purchase or subscription out of the question for many of the resources they tried earlier in the year. As a result, library staff will still need to work on long-term solutions for online learning, and they may need to speak to faculty and students regarding why the solutions that worked in the spring are no longer available.

Open educational resources

The value of open educational resources (OER) and OA material is exceptionally clear in this moment. OERs are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (UNESCO, n.d.). The truth is that many of the problems universities encountered this spring were not new. Online learning is far from a new phenomenon, and even with classes that take place completely on campus, access to physical resources is not universally available. Commercial textbooks can often be a financial burden that students can ill afford, and having a physical copy in the library is not a solution that works for many students. Similarly, building lessons and assignments around other kinds of resources (such as videos that can only be viewed in class or anatomical models on reserve in the library) can represent significant barriers for students. There has been a need for adaptable, freely available course materials for a long time.

Certainly, shifting a course to OER is not always an easy endeavor. Promoting and supporting the implementation of OER can take significant resources, and converting a class on the fly would be a tall order. That said, relying on temporary free access is a short-term approach to a problem that is not going away. It is an approach that could only increase reliance on models that will quickly prove unsustainable on many campuses. No amount of extended deadlines will turn a paywalled resource into a fully open resource. For students who cannot access commercially-published resources, for faculty who need reliable access to adaptable course materials, and for library staff who need to support changing modes of instruction, open materials offer a promising future.

Notes

1 RedShelf and VitalSource both allowed students to access a limited number of books for free through May 25. This was announced at https://studentresponse.redshelf.com/ for RedShelf and https://get.vitalsource.com/vitalsource-helps for VitalSource.