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OU Libraries Monthly Feature: Profiles in Open Featuring Crag Hill

Crag Hill has short gray hair and glasses and is focused on a laptop in a cozy café setting. He is wearing a beige collared pullover. A coffee cup and papers are on the wooden table were he sits, suggesting a relaxed work atmosphere.
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OU Libraries

“Profiles in Open” regularly features OU scholars who advocate for open access and make their work openly accessible, benefitting authors, readers, funders, the public, and others. Check out this month’s profile of Crag Hill.

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 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 needed 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.