I published the In Beta newsletter on Open Scholarship a few weeks ago, and wanted to add a few thoughts here, almost as an addendum.
Open scholarship is an attempt to bring about a fundamental shift in academia, emphasising transparency, accessibility, and collaboration in research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination.
In my opinion, it has largely failed as a project.
I think that most people reading this would probably disagree. After all, we’ve seen a massive increase in the number of open-access journals, open datasets, funding criteria linked to open dissemination, and so on.
But my concern is that open scholarship – for all its good intentions – still exists within the existing paradigm, and is therefore constrained by those limitations. In other words, open scholarship is valued only insofar as it reinforces the (perverse) incentives of the publishing machine.
While open scholarship advocates for freely available research findings, shared teaching materials, and student contributions to a global knowledge commons, these are (almost) always positioned against journal impact factors, and metrics like your h-index. Why publish in an open-access journal? Because it will likely increase your citations. Why include student researchers in your project? Because funders look favourably on that. Why share your teaching materials? Because increasingly, that too is acknowledged on promotion applications.
I think the concept of ‘open scholarship’ needs a revision because it has been captured by the status quo in higher education. And I think the status quo is broken. I’m not entirely sure how to articulate my thoughts on the problem, only that it’s something I feel strongly about.
Also, I think we need to drop the ‘open’ because it reinforces the default position, which is that regular scholarship is ‘closed’. Which it is. All scholarship should be open.