Open access business cases
Johan Friberg Spetz
International Marketing program Halmstad University, Sweden
Abstract/Purpose:
The purpose of this article is to analyse if business cases are available in open access. The overall purpose is to present where there is open access and if it’s a university, journal or institute, which have open access to their business cases.
Design/methodology/approach
this paper is using a method called qualitative secondary research from various databases. Mostly form Emerald, Web of Science, Scopus and Google scholar. Books and some internet sites and blogs are also used in this paper..
Implications/Findings
According to this study there is not much written about open access to business cases. But there are some big universities, which have open access to their business cases. All of these use cases as an education tool. There are also some journals that help poor countries to access knowledge easier by offering open access to scientific work.
Originality/value
This paper offers a insight in what’s available for open access. Business cases is used in teaching and here you can find some places where there are cases to use. The paper gives knowledge to student, teachers and institutes.
Keywords
business cases, case studies, open access, available cases.
Paper type Research paper.
Introduction:
There has been a dramatic change since the entrance of the Internet.
Publications of science matter has become digital and therefore the scientific communication has developed into digitalization (Repanovici, 2010) This paper's purpose is to find out which kind of business cases anyone have open access to. The internet has made it easier to do research for all scientists. Mainly because of the permanent trend of publishing online. It has become a global access to teaching
material/information and scientific information is easier than ever to find (Gurov, Goncharova, and Bubyakin, 2016). Case studies today are used for teaching and education in business courses and programs. There are three schools in business that have used this for a while and these are CBS (Copenhagen business school), Harvard and MIT. The teaching aspect of business cases is to provide a better way to learn. But to make people use business cases more in a learning perspective it would be easier to find them in open access. There fore the research questions are;
What is available in Open Access? What is not?
Method
:This researches goal is to see where you can find business cases to open access. Mostly will the biggest university’s be examine and se what they offer and if they do offer anything to open access.
The research is a qualitative secondary research and answers will be find in other written research, articles, journals, blogs, press etc. But mostly from databases witch contains quality scientific work such as Scopus, Web of Sciences Emerald and Google scholar. Some books will also be included in this research. There are some problems with this kind of research. The gathered information is actually made in a way to solve another problem than the problem in this research. The information is made to answer another problem formulation. In a qualitative secondary research the new researcher interprets the collections of different texts.
Therefore you have to be and stay critical of all sources (Jacobsen, 2002).
Manny universities have a press where they announce news about open access, these are used in this research to find out witch schools release their scientific work to everyone. There are also scientific journals who present some work to open access and these are mostly find through Google-searches or in one of the scientific data bases mentioned.
Literature review:
Case studies can be defined in so many was but there are some characteristics facts that usually is there. The most common is of course knowledge. You can say that it’s a method to get knowledge.
In a case study there are different occasions that has been studied. These occasions are then put together and a decision is made. Case studies are made to come to a decision (Søilen & Huber 2006). Case studies includes hypotheses witch you can test. Therefore they can be used in some
investigations, in the early stages (Flyvbjerg 2003). Of course case studies can be described in many different way and one of them is this:
“Documented study of a specific real-life situation or imagined scenario, used as a training tool in business schools and firms. Students or trainees are required to analyze the prescribed cases and present their
interpretations or solutions, supported by the line of reasoning employed and assumptions made.”
Business dictionary, 27/11 – 16)
Open Access is a term that defines different, the definition used in this paper is that open access should be available in digital form, free from licensing and copyright, free of charge and online based.
(Czerniewicz, Goodier, 2014)
There are three big universities that already have an open access to their business case studies and everything that comes with it. These ones are Copenhagen Business school, Harvard Business school and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of management (Harvard business school blog, 2010-02-28).
There is also an institute, the Clute institute, that provides open access to case studies. These are provided in journals possible and available for anyone to get access to. The Clute institute means that the contribution to open access was more important than the subscription revenue. They have provided the open access since 2011 (The cluteinstitute, 2011) Another journal that provides open access is; Journal of Business case studies. They are providing the users with cases used for education and understanding of business and can be complements to business courses. The Clute institute says:
“The intent of JBCS is to publish papers that significantly contribute to the field of teaching & learning by using business case studies.” (The cluteinstitute, 2011)
Open access make it so much easier fore people to get quality knowledge.
Everyone are on the same level regardless if they go to the university or not and where the live (Suber 2010)
Case Center is a website that gives you as a user, teacher or student, opportunity for open access. The only thing you need is an account at the page that of course is free of charge. There is also paid cases on the site if that is of interest. Case Center favour case teaching and the case method, which is a reason to provide open access to their cases. (The case
center)
Teaching business by example is the best way for both students and teachers. (Business case studies) Case studies are used in teaching and many have a positive attitude to it. Volpe (2015) explain that students learn best from case studies, just becase they get both theoretical and practical parts in the education. The most important thing for the student is to reflect by them self. Case studies usually enlighten a problem and student learns a lot by understand the problem and analyse it by them (Merseth 1996). To teach and learn from case studies is used in so many felids and one of them is business. Usually this type of learning is really appreciated (Popil, 2010).
There are also some big newspapers over the world that provides open access to business cases. On of them is New York times. They provide a service where they upload case studies of small businesses owners where the reader can think along and comment on the case. You are able to see what kind of decision the owner has made and analyse different situations in the case. A blog is attached to the case where you can discuss situations with the owner and other readers. (New york Times 2014).
Jstor.org is a site that provides scientific work, mostly in form of journals in different areas but also cases and articles, to developing countries.
They have an initiative called “African Access Initiative” where they give full access to their archives for African institutions without require payment. They also have a similar initiative called “The developing nations access initiative” which provides poor countries outside Africa with scientific work. Jstor have over a thousand titles, among them around 120 in the economic field. Thus research and learning has
become much more easy in the developing countries. The digital age has made it possible for Jstor to offer universities in these countries access science (Mehlum, 2012). Open acces mostly from Europe’s universities building a wider knowledge in economy, raising science and literacy (Björnshauge, Ferwerda, Jacobs, Sinikara, Swan, de Vries, Van
Wesenbeeck 2011)
There are two types of open access publication, green and gold open access. Gold open access represent the cases/Journals/articles which is published directly from the author or the site of the scientific work.
Green is a publication which can be done if the publisher let it be, if its gets published in a repository or if the embargo runs out (Vincent, Wickham 2013)
As Pinfield (2015) says there is now a duality between the to forms of publications. Tough gold open access is more for journals where more case studies are published. But there are some opinions that the are quite similar green and gold (Guédon 2008)( Suber 2012). Pinfield (2015) also claims that open access becoming mainstream in the scholar and peer- reviewed communication. There is not a big discussion about open access should exist or not. It’s more about how it should be done. Scholar trends are most in favour for open access and today’s issue is more how to proceed with it. Not if it should be or not (Pinfield 2015).
There are some differences in different parts of the world. Latin America has a big base of gold open access. Therefore there are many business cases that are based in Latin American culture and business (Alperin, 2015).
Open access will continue to expand and more mandates will be for it.
Governments, which fund research, will also expand. There could be political complications, in form of how libraries should spend their money and get access to libraries licensed research of good quality (Machovec 2016).
Institutions have had help form libraries to make cases and journals accessible for everyone. Libraries is an important part of scientific literature, they have been responsible for a long time in history for knowledge in books. They have also developed a few publishing services (Lawrence, 2010; Lippincott 2015)
Harvard business school didn’t have any clear plan when it started. Their solution was to interview high and leading businessmen. They wrote accounts in detail of what these men were doing. Professors of Harvard business school made their students read them and then have a big discussion about them. This was the best thing to do in this time. Because there were no criteria available. This is stilled used in business school today but in a more effective way. (Boundless 2016)
ANALYS
The main purpose of this research was to find out which business cases where available and which were not. There is of course a huge thing to check the entire Internet and the research has been narrowed down. This is of course a bias and general conclusions can’t be made regarding the whole
“market of open access”.
What is available in Open Access? What is not?
To answer this properly the research has had to be much bigger.
But what the information in this research says is that open access will become much more common in the future. Just business cases are available at a number of universities over the world.
Harvard business school, MIT and Copenhagen business school have all made their cases open for everyone. Harvard’s history of using business cases in their education is still there. So to answer the question, much are available to open access mostly by journals on sites such as Jstor.org.
Their contribution to Africa and other poor and less developed world is a magnificent thing to do. There are now able to reach more scientific work thru jstor.org. There are many journals and schools that have open
access to their business cases. In this research the following do have open access:
• Copenhagen business school
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of management
• Harvard business school
• The Clute institute
• Journal of Business case studies
• Case Centre
• New York times
• Jstor
The fact that three so big university’s have open access to all work that comes out of there is just amazing. All of them are using business cases in their education and think that students learn thru this. Just as Volpe (2015), Merseth (1996) and Popil (2010) sates this method of learning is the right way to go.
There are so many different subjects in open access. You can publish thru gold and green open access you can publish in a journal or a school can publish his or her own work. There are still many institutions, schools and journals that haven’t got open access but if we shall believe Pinfield (2015). Open access is going to be the big thing.
Conclusion
Open access are on it’s way. Many have already made it possible. The hardest part seems to be the finance but there are good examples of it working, both in schools and in journals. Since it becoming more common to use business cases in teaching, open access to just business cases are going to be more used by universities. Findings in this study show that spreading knowledge is an important thing. There are several journals that give open access to poor and less educated countries. So that knowledge can be spread regardless of economic status. This is a fantastic thing for the world itself.
Implications
According to this study not many have open access to their business cases but there are some that have. This should implicate to do more studies about open access to business cases. By doing that more institutes and universities will open their access. Which will increase people’s
knowledge. More of studies in the subject are necessary for open access.
Suggestions for futher studies
Suggestions to further research in the list below:
• There is not much written of open access to business cases, therefore a recomendation is to make a bigger secondary research than this.
• Another is to make a research of which of the biggest universities in the world that have open access.
• Make a research with part of the world that is for open access.
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