This paper came from a curiosity (maybe even a frustration) — what is returned when you search for an educational research article on Google Scholar? And, relatedly, how widely accessible is research in our field? And, relatedly, how accessible is research in our own field?
We looked at over 2,500 articles published between 2010 and 2022 across six AERA journals. Using what we described as a “Public Internet data mining” approach we asked a simple set of questions: Is the article available? In what form? And where? The work was just published in Teachers College Record. This is the first study of its kind to empirically document the accessibility of educational research and our hope is that it could inform efforts to make our work more accessible to teachers, leaders, and the public.
Here’s what we found:
About 65% of articles were accessible in some form—a much higher rate than the roughly 28% reported for scholarly articles in general in other, prior work.
Most of those accessible versions were the published PDFs, often posted on sites like ResearchGate.
Only about 6% were openly licensed, meaning they can be freely reused.
The rest were a mix of preprints, temporary “free” versions, or other file types.
On the one hand, this is encouraging: many more articles are available than we might expect. On the other hand, the picture is messy. Access depends on whether an author uploaded a copy to a site, whether you know where to look, and whether reuse is even allowed.
Perhaps the bigger question is what kind of field we want educational research to be. If our work is meant to inform teaching, policy, and public understanding, shouldn’t the default be that anyone—teachers, school board members, families—can actually read it?
Shout out to my fantastic colleagues George Veletsianos, Enilda Romero-Hall, and Emilie Allen for the collaboration on this. You can access the article on TCR’s homepage here.
And (of course!) there is an open-access version — that’s on OSF here.