Open Scholarship Press Collections: Community/Open Social Scholarship

Open Scholarship

Arbuckle, Alyssa. 2019a. “Open+: Versioning Open Social Scholarship.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 3 (February): 18. https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.39

Advocates of the Open Access movement have been fighting for free and unfettered access to research output since the early 1990s. Open access is a crucial element of a fair, efficient scholarly communication system where all are able to find, interpret, and use the results of publicly-funded research. Arbuckle argues that versioning scholarship across varying modes and formats would move scholarly communication from a straightforward open access system to a more engaging environment for multiple communities. Universal open access is more possible now than ever before, thanks to networked technologies and the development of open scholarship policies. But, Arbuckle asks, what happens after access to research is provided?

Arbuckle, Alyssa, and John Maxwell. 2019. “Modelling Open Social Scholarship Within the INKE Community.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 3 (February): 2. https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.15

Arbuckle and Maxwell contest that, given the current state of digital technology, there is a clear opportunity to revamp scholarly communication into a multi-faceted, open system that integrates and takes advantage of the near-ubiquitous global network. In doing so, the values of collaboration, sharing, and transparency inherent to open social scholarship can be integrated into knowledge dissemination methods. The INKE community is currently organized around the idea of open social scholarship, but putting this into practice will involve assessing and revising its own scholarly communication processes. Arbuckle and Maxwell explore the current state of open access to academic research and ruminate on next steps, beyond open access. They consider the role of collaboration in contemporary academic practice, and the importance of transparency in regards to multiplayer work. Further, the authors examine the standard scholarly communication model, especially as it pertains to INKE. Finally, Arbuckle and Maxwell make recommendations and suggest alternatives for transforming our stock scholarly communication models into open social scholarship practices.

Aspesi, Claudio, and Amy Brand. 2020. “In Pursuit of Open Science, Open Access is Not Enough.” Science 368 (6491): 574-77. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aba3763

Aspesi and Brand warn the academic community about the pitfalls of an uncoordinated approach to open access. The authors suggest that the current open access hype is opening the door for an increased monopoly of digitized academic services and assets by the Top 5 publishers. In particular, Aspesi and Brand highlight the increase of commercial publisher activity in the areas of data analytics, research and service hosting, and portal services, among others. This is of particular concern for the authors as they suggest this may lead to (further) inequitable access to research materials, a lack of diversity in the scholarly publishing world, and a scenario where universities remain beholden to commercial publishers for value-added services that replicate the model—and financial unsustainability—of the current subscription system. To quell this tide, Aspesi and Brand recommend a coordinated approach among academic institutions in developing the infrastructure required for an equitable open scholarship system.

+ Belojevic, Nina. 2015. “Developing an Open, Networked Peer Review System.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (2): n.p. https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2015v6n2a205

Belojevic presents the Personas for Open, Networked Peer Review wireframe prototype: an open, networked peer-review model initiated by Belojevic and Jentery Sayers in 2013 that was further developed by the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory, in partnership with University of Victoria Libraries, the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, and the Public Knowledge Project. In this environment, articles undergo open peer review and can be commented on by a specific group of reviewers or the public. The prototyping process followed an approach similar to the one described in Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals in which they outline common game design principles. Belojevic describes how the project moved from iterative prototyping to agile development, an approach that permits researchers to break down the project into smaller chunks. This approach allows stakeholders to ensure that their goals are being met at every stage and scholars and researchers to maintain the quality of the project. Further research will focus on determining the aspects of agile development that are adaptable for the project in order to facilitate a balance between project development and deliverables, while being flexible enough to pursue and integrate novel insights that may appear during the prototyping process.

Borgman, Christine. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Borgman provides a thorough overview of the digital scholarship environment that accounts for trends and issues in policies, institutions, disciplines, and technologies. Her goal is to characterize the state of digital scholarship and to frame it within social, historical, and technological contexts. Borgman situates digital scholarship (or e-Research, as she often refers to it) within a longer trajectory of efforts to make scholarly communication more efficient, useful, and expansive. She also suggests that a bottom-up approach to digital scholarship will ultimately not be successful, because of low incentives and high barriers. Contrary to grassroots advocates, Borgman believes that institutions and policymakers, rather than individual faculty members or librarians, must implement digital scholarship. Overall, Borgman urges her readers to think critically about how—and why—the academic community is building digital infrastructure to support and supplement scholarly research.

Ψ Bullard, Julia. 2019. “Knowledge Organization For Open Scholarship.” Pop! Public. Open. Participatory 1 (October). https://doi.org/10.21810/pop.2019.005

Bullard discusses the need for culturally specific knowledge organization infrastructures as a foundation for open scholarship in Canada. Focusing on subject description, the process by which the “aboutness” of information resources is described, the author notes that the standards for subject description—the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), PubMed’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and the Modern Language Association (MLA) Commons—were developed in the US. Like all knowledge systems, these systems reflect the perspectives and biases of their creators; thus, using them to structure and organize Canadian scholarship may lead to its “distortion.” Bullard outlines plans for a research project that draws on infrastructure theory and critical theory to investigate the creation of subject description infrastructure informed by openness, multiculturalism, and decolonization. The author concludes by noting that this research into knowledge organization infrastructures is well aligned with the INKE Partnership’s interest in open infrastructure.

Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group. 2017. Final Report. Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group. https://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/CSPWG_final_report_EN.pdf

The authors of this report outline the current challenges to the Canadian academic publishing system, as well as suggest principles to guide a successful, sustainable system moving forward. These principles include accountability (to the academy); openness; high-quality publishing practices; well-informed authors; dynamic Canadian publishing opportunities; foundational strengths; flexibility; and adaptability. The authors applaud initiatives like the collaboration between Érudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to bring more open access journals to more libraries. The compilers also draw on Canadian journal statistics to highlight that many journals are under-supported, but note that of the functioning journals in Canada, many are supported by libraries and/or the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Assistance to Scholarly Journals Fund, and are either gold open access or allow for green open access. Overall, the report authors recommend a coordinated and well-funded approach to scholarly publishing in Canada that spans primary research outputs, including journals, monographs, and born-digital artifacts.

Chan, Leslie, Bud Hall, Florence Piron, Rajesh Tandon, and Lorna Williams. 2020. “Open Science Beyond Open Access: For and With Communities. A Step Towards the Decolonization of Knowledge.” The Canadian Commission for UNESCO’s IdeaLab.

Chan, Hall, Piron, Tandon, and Williams argue that it is time to move beyond foundational understandings of open access and open science. They suggest that academic institutions and researchers should open themselves up further to increase relevance within the broader conception of civil society. The authors gloss some of the historical reasons for the relative openness and closedness of scholarly activity to broader society, including the fact that knowledge workers sought refuge in the university as a space to think critically without fear of censorship or worse from the ruling powers of their time. Chan et al. are quick to point out, however, that such self-protection developed into an exclusionary practice, or a way to gatekeep who is and is not considered expert. This has many present-day ramifications, including for Indigenous and marginalized peoples whose knowledges are often not valued in scientific contexts. Overall, the authors suggest that as open scholarship initiatives, policies, and theories evolve they should be expanded to include a more decolonial approach to knowledge creation and sharing.

Lynch, Clifford A., and Lee Dirks. 2011. “New Initiatives in Open Research.” Proceedings of the Charleston Library Conference.

Lynch and Dirks describe a handful of open scholarship initiatives, current as of 2011. These include VIVO, ORCID, Dataverse, Microsoft Academic Search, DataCite, and Total Impact. The authors are optimistic about the possibilities that these initiatives bear for open scholarship, especially when they work together. Most of the initiatives (except for Total Impact) are still growing and functioning initiatives, which is impressive considering the relative longevity of many academic initiatives.

Marczewska, Kaja, Janneke Adema, Frances McDonald, and Whitney Trettien. 2018. The Poethics of Scholarship. Post Office Press and Rope Press.

Within the concept of a scholarly poethics, or, an ethical poetics, Marczewska, Adema, McDonald, and Trettien take a critical approach to open, digital scholarship. Marczewska rails against the co-opting and corporatization of the Open Access movement and argues for a more action-oriented approach to open scholarship. Adema advocates for a return to critical, experimental open scholarship interventions. McDonald and Trettien vouch for an informal, boundary-object approach to digital scholarship. As an example, they discuss the Thresholds project, which purposefully features unfinished or in-development works. Overall, Marczewska et al. suggest that the future of open, digital scholarship might benefit from returning to its messier past—one that puts less emphasis on the production of clean and portable PDFs that fit tidily into emerging neoliberal evaluation schemes.

Martin, Victoria. 2020. “The Concept of Openness in Scholarship.” In Open Praxis, Open Access: Digital Scholarship in Action, edited by Darren Chase and Dana Haugh, 3–18. Chicago: American Library Association.

Martin provides a foundational look at what open scholarship is with a distinct focus on open access. She suggests that although openness in scholarship can be difficult to define, it can be perceived in several different ways: as transparency, scientific norm, ethical obligation, freedom of inquiry, mindset, author’s right, user’s right, freedom from cost, or technological advance. Overall, Martin argues, open access is at a transformational stage and libraries are well positioned to advance and facilitate further openness in scholarship.

Maxwell, John W. 2015. “Beyond Open Access to Open Publication and Open Scholarship.” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (3). https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2015v6n3a202

Maxwell imagines a humanities-based digital scholarly communication system modeled after prevalent web technologies, practices, and metaphors. He compares the opportunities that such an approach might bear to traditional scholarly communication practices. For Maxwell, the research outputs of both models share a set of common characteristics (albeit to different degrees): they reflect a considerable amount of time and labour; they are original works; they are rigorous and reviewed by experts; they are available for engagement; and they are able to be archived or preserved for future reference. Maxwell looks beyond the common characteristics of web-based and traditional academic publishing models, however, and considers how the former could break away from the latter.

Ψ Maxwell, John W., Erik Hanson, Leena Desai, Carmen Tiampo, Kim O’Donnell, Avvai Ketheeswaran, Melody Sun, Emma Walter, and Ellen Michelle. 2019. Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms. PubPub. https://doi.org/10.21428/6bc8b38c.2e2f6c3f

Maxwell et al. survey the landscape of open source publishing tools and platforms and provide a catalogue with profiles of more than 50 of them. The authors emphasize the need to view these tools as part of the complex system of digital publishing infrastructure and explain the role of open source software within the Open Access movement. Explaining that the goal of this survey is to help institutions and individuals involved in digital publication to choose the tools and platforms that will best fit their needs, the authors argue that these open source tools have the potential to form community infrastructure that could replace the commercial one. Although the authors set out to identify functional gaps in the digital publishing system, they conclude rather that a lack of coordination and integration of the existing tools and platforms is the more salient issue: many are developed in isolation to address a specific institutional or project need, and funding structures and other resource paths tend to favour the development of new things rather than the integration, maintenance, and preservation of existing ones.

McGregor, Heidi, and Kevin Guthrie. 2015. “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3). https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.302

McGregor and Guthrie write from the intellectual standpoint that open access to academic research is undoubtedly beneficial, but they also consider what other factors are required—beyond open access—to truly heighten global research impact. The authors base their argument on their experiences with JSTOR, the not-for-profit organization that negotiates access to scholarly journals and articles and in turn supplies this access to institutions and individuals on a sliding scale. McGregor and Guthrie’s primary method is to develop the Pyramid of Productive Use, which includes different conditions necessary for academics to engage with research output: literacy, technology, awareness, access, and training. Overall, they contest that open access should not end at free access, but should rather extend into the realm of productive use of research materials.

+† Meadows, Alice. 2015. “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3): n.p. https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.301

Meadows argues that open access should merely be the beginning of new trends of openness and access to scholarly resources. She summarizes and evaluates a series of public, low-cost access initiatives started between 1990 and 2014, including Access to Research; Electronic Information for Libraries; the International Network for Access to Scientific Publications; the New School for Social Research’s Journal Donation Project; patientACCESS; and Research for Life. Meadows argues that these initiatives are valuable for publishers because they increase access to, and usage of, content beyond core markets. While Meadows acknowledges that open access is definitely not a one-size-fits-all challenge, publishers, small businesses, and medium enterprises all have something to gain from the movement: the opportunity to engage new audiences.

Montgomery, Lucy, John Hartley, Cameron Neylon, Malcolm Gillies, Eve Gray, Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, et al. 2018. “Open Knowledge Institutions.” Works in Progress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press OA Books. https://doi.org/10.21428/99f89a34

Montgomery et al. consider the role of the academic institution in the twenty-first century. They argue that universities should transition into open knowledge institutions, with values of openness and broad community engagement at their core. Montgomery et al. lay out their proposal for open knowledge institutions while suggesting ways that such a shift in orientation could continue to meet policy, public, and professional needs alike. Overall, the authors present a vision for more engaged and accessible higher education.

Neylon, Cameron. 2017. “Openness in Scholarship: A Return to Core Values?” In Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Electronic Publishing, edited by Leslie Chan and Fernando Loizides, 6–18. Amsterdam: IOS Press Ebooks.

Neylon argues that situating open scholarship as a radical break away from traditional scholarly communication practices is, in fact, detrimental to the movement’s success. Rather, the author suggests that advocates should present open scholarship as conservative and deeply rooted in academic practice. He highlights broadly accepted philosophical arguments for academic openness from established scholars such as Thomas Kuhn and Bruno Latour, who have both suggested that opening up scientific discourse to individuals or information from outside of the academy is beneficial.

Pearce, Nick, Martin Weller, Eileen Scanlon, and Sam Kinsley. 2010. “Digital Scholarship Considered: How New Technologies Could Transform Academic Work.” In Education 16 (1): 33–44. https://journals.uregina.ca/ineducation/article/view/44

Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, and Ashleigh explore how the development and uptake of new technologies affect academia. They argue that although there are clear possibilities for technology to influence scholarship, this is not an unavoidable outcome of technological change. Pearce et al. frame their exploration of digital technology and academia within Ernest Boyer’s definition of scholarship as containing four dimensions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. Discovery, the authors suggest, is represented by open data; integration by open publishing; application by public engagement; and teaching by open education. In these ways, Pearce et al. represent digital technology as emphasizing, continuing, or replicating the integral activities of scholarship.

Δ Peters, Michael A., Tze-Chang Liu, and David J. Ondercin. 2012. “Learned Societies, Public Good Science and Openness in the Digital Age.” In The Pedagogy of the Open Society, 105–27. Open Education 1. Rotterdam: SensePublishers.

Peters, Liu, and Ondercin examine the relationship of learned societies to current digital scholarship. They explain that the concept of learned society “provides a complementary global civic model for development especially given arguments concerning science as a global public good” (117). Some features of the learned society are collective learning, interactions between individuals in learning processes, and the use of technology to learn, interact, and build upon other information. The authors relate this to the history of scientific learned societies—mainly founded after the Renaissance—because they provide a model with a commitment to public knowledge and science based on peer review that does not rely on the state or the market. In the context of digital scholarship, the authors suggest that current learned societies need to expand their contribution to public science and education by exploring the possibilities of the Internet and social media for knowledge creation and distribution.

Pooley, Jefferson. 2017a. “Scholarly Communications Shouldn’t Just Be Open, but Non-Profit Too.” LSE Impact Blog. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/08/15/scholarly-communications-shouldnt-just-be-open-but-non-profit-too/

Pooley argues that scholarly communication is at a crossroads. Two factions are now working to develop an open science system: for-profit commercial companies and conglomerates, and non-profit presses and universities. The author outlines the major players on both sides, as well as their stakes in scholarly communication, and comes down, decidedly, on the side of non-profit open access publishing. “A publishing ecosystem centred on scholarly values […] is within reach,” Pooley writes; “For that to happen, we have to throw our weight behind the non-profits, before it’s too late” (n.p.). Pooley suggests that the non-profit faction could gain control of scholarly communication if libraries began seriously redirecting funds toward them and away from corporate entities. Further, he concludes, education and advocacy work are required on a peer basis, in order to convince fellow scholars to fight for an open, non-profit future for scholarly publishing.

+ Saklofske, Jon. 2016. “Digital Theoria, Poiesis and Praxis: Activating Humanities Research and Communication through Open Social Scholarship Platform Design.” Scholarly and Research Communication 7 (2): n.p. https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2016v7n2/3a252

Saklofske states that although research has drastically changed in the last two decades, scholarly communication has remained relatively stable, adhering to standard scholarly forms of publication as a result of materialist economies. Saklofske argues for the necessity of innovating digital means of scholarly communication with theoria, poiesis, and praxis in mind. He offers a number of case studies that experiment with unconventional ways of carrying out research that utilize these concepts, among which is the NewRadial prototype: an online environment that brings in secondary scholarship and debate, where outside information can be added to, and visualized with, the primary data without affecting the original databases. NewRadial is taken as a model for other spaces that facilitate dynamic organization and centralized spacing as an alternative solution to typical, isolated forms of monographs and linear narrativization. Saklofske, who is a proponent of open social scholarship, argues that this type of scholarship is an essential part of the transformation of scholarly research and communication—a transformation that would take advantage of the digital medium rather than propagating conventional forms of knowledge creation into this environment. This type of research platform is also more inclusive and public-facing.

+ Veletsianos, George. 2015. “A Case Study of Scholars’ Open and Sharing Practices.” Open Praxis 7 (3): 199–209. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.7.3.206

Veletsianos addresses the extent of enactment of open scholarship in institutions that lack a formal infrastructure to support such research. This is carried out through a case study on Tall Mountain University––a public, not-for-profit North American institution––specifically by working with faculty members. According to the case study, there are a number of ways in which open scholarship is carried out, with certain practices being favoured over others; some examples include open access manuscripts and educational resources, social media, and open teaching/pedagogy. Another finding is that some faculty members publish their materials openly on the Internet without attaching open licenses, and that the settings of the platform, as well as the institutional protocol, also affect the extent to which the material is accessible. Despite these findings, Veletsianos states that open scholarship is still a relatively narrow practice at the institution. The author outlines possible limitations of the research, such as open practices that may not have been revealed in the case study and possible limitations of Google Scholar (the search engine used for this research) that may prevent the study from being exhaustive. The study is also descriptive and does not address the motivations behind practicing open scholarship.

* Veletsianos, George, and Royce Kimmons. 2012. “Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 13 (4): 166–89. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v13i4.1313

Veletsianos and Kimmons identify some assumptions of the Open Scholarship movement and highlight some challenges associated with them. They observe that open scholarship is usually assumed as rooted in an ethical pursuit for democratization, equality, and justice, while emphasizing the importance of digital participation for better outcomes, and that it is co-evolutionary with technological advances. Based on the work of Neil Selwyn on sociology of education and technology, the authors argue that there is a need for more critical examination of open scholarly practices, because there is a dominant narrative that overwhelmingly presents technology as positive for education in the future. Thus, the authors point out that values of social justice and equality, although ideally considered, are not necessarily always present in open scholarship practices, and that the participation in digital culture demands social and digital literacies. Furthermore, they reinforce the need to consider that technology is neither neutral nor the solution to educational and scholarly problems, and that technology and open scholarship introduce new tensions and dilemmas, by tending to connect only similarly thinking individuals and by requiring them to deal with an exponentially increasing volume of information.

Open Access

+ Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Overview of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” OAPEN Project Report. https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/a976330e-ed7a-4bd5-b0ed47cab90e9a5e/1/ademaoapen2comb.pdf

Adema provides an overview of current open access publishing models being experimented with by organizations and institutions in the humanities and social sciences. The author intends to find strategies for making open access book publishing a sustainable enterprise, with funding and profit for all parties involved. Adema explores a variety of business models and publishing processes that make up what she terms the “experimental phase” of open access book publishing. She touches on the motives—both monetary and missionary—behind the Open Access movement, compares various presses and press partnerships, and explores the different practices and collaborations that make open access sustainable.

Ahmed, Allam. 2007. “Open Access Towards Bridging the Digital Divide—Policies and Strategies for Developing Countries.” Information Technology for Development 13 (4): 337–61. https://doi.org/10.1002/itdj.20067

Ahmed assesses open access as a potential solution to the digital divide and accompanying knowledge and wealth gaps in academia, internationally. At the time of publication (2007), there are infrastructure and institutional policy gaps in Africa that prohibit a continent-wide open access system. A successful open access system requires both researcher access to and creation of free, open publications and data. Ahmed argues that this is problematic when standard technological infrastructure and nationwide open access initiatives comparable to those in the United Kingdom and United States do not necessarily exist across Africa, and when certain African nations promote censorship and other information regulation laws that prohibit open access publishing. Open access without the appropriate technical, social, and legal infrastructure is inconsequential, and could in fact render scholarship even more inaccessible to researchers whose countries are not currently able to build and sustain a digital scholarship system.

Albornoz, Denisse, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan. 2020. “Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 65–79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Albornoz, Okune, and Chan challenge the idea that open access has made all knowledge more available. Rather, the authors suggest, open access has made research undertaken by scholars in the Global North more available, to the detriment and increased obscuration of research by scholars in the Global South. The authors reinforce this point when they argue that “open systems may potentially replicate the very values and power imbalances that the movement initially sought to change” (65), in particular regarding the replication of epistemic injustice. They also outline institutional forces that have invalidated certain types of knowledge, including academic publishing, the primacy of the English language, and professional advancement criteria. Albornoz, Okune, and Chan conclude by making four recommendations for open research: 1) for scholars in the Global North to recognize their privilege; 2) to challenge the current standards and norms that promote epistemic injustice; 3) to learn from ongoing projects that are already seeking to address injustice; and 4) to recontextualize open access as a more radical movement with direct responsibility for undoing structural oppression.

Asmah, Josephine. 2014. International Policy and Practice on Open Access for Monographs. Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. https://www.ideas-idees.ca/sites/default/files/aspp-oa-appendix.pdf

Asmah focuses primarily on monographs in the open access system. She draws together a comprehensive study of open access policies concerning monographs from around the world, including case studies from Austria, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, France, the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, and Canada. Asmah finds that Europe has the highest number of monograph open access policies and details the regulations and implementations of such policies.

Bailey, D. Russell. 2017. “Creating Digital Knowledge: Library as Open Access Digital Publisher.” College & Undergraduate Libraries 24 (2–4): 216–225. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2017.1323695

Bailey comments on the possibilities for university libraries in the digital age. He argues that there are increasing opportunities for libraries to facilitate or even produce open access digital scholarship. Bailey walks his readers through three examples of digital scholarship projects led by Providence College: a multimedia monograph and two online journals. He concludes that open access digital publishing in higher education is not only increasingly prevalent, but feasible, useful, and scalable as well.

Bullinger, Hans-Jörg, Karl Max Einhäupl, Peter Gaehtgens, Peter Gruss, Hans-Olaf Henkel, Walter Kröll, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, et al. 2003. “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.” https://openaccess.mpg.de/67605/berlin_declaration_engl.pdf

The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (Berlin Declaration) is a coordinated effort to support, legitimize, and commit to open access to scholarly research. The document’s compilers argue that a pledge toward the wide and comprehensive dissemination of knowledge via the Internet is critical to gain the most benefit for both science and broader society. By drawing together a national and international group of signatories under a commitment to open access knowledge production and sharing, the document recognizes and gives weight to the Open Access movement, specifically within the context of networked technologies. Beyond the impressive list of signatories, the Berlin Declaration also includes specific goals, definitions, and conditions (for authors, rights holders, and the work itself), which further legitimize its message.

Chan, Leslie, Darius Cuplinskas, Michael Eisen, Fred Friend, Yana Genova, Jean-Claude Guédon, Melissa Hagemann, et al. 2002. “Budapest Open Access Initiative.” Budapest, Hungary: Budapest Open Access Initiative. https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (Budapest Initiative) takes the line that open access is a public good, and that by implementing this public good, education will be enriched and research will be accelerated and made more useful. Such positive benefits, according to the initiative, will help to unite humanity in a common quest for further knowledge. The Budapest Initiative signatories are clear on what they believe constitutes open access: free availability of research on the Internet for anyone to use lawfully. This document recommends two strategies for realizing broad open access to research output—self-archiving and open access journals—and also nods toward potential funding options.

+ Chan, Leslie. 2004. “Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age.” Canadian Journal of Communication 29 (3): 277–300.

Chan argues that the key goal of open access is to maximize the impact of research by reaching the largest number of readers possible. This impact can be measured by counting citation references connected to specific articles. The author summarizes a study conducted by the Institute of Scientific Information that found, when studying 190 journals, that those with open access and those with proprietary access showed no difference in impact. However, Chan argues that these data are invalid because the study took the journal, not the individual article, as its unit of measurement. Conducting his own research, Chan finds that there was, in fact, an impact factor difference of 300% in favour of open access articles. For Chan, knowledge is a public good and must be distributed as openly as possible.

Cohen, Daniel J. 2010. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values.” Hacking the Academy (27 May). https://www.dancohen.org/2010/05/27/open-access-publishing-and-scholarly-values/

Cohen adds his voice to the chorus of open access advocates who aim to educate the professoriate on what exactly open access is, and why it is so crucial for knowledge dissemination and the overall health of the academic system. He identifies four emotions or values—impartiality, passion, shame, and narcissism—and relates them to the current scholarly communication system. Cohen suggests that impartiality should reign over publication venue choice; that is, the merit of a publication should be based on quality rather than journal prestige (or lack thereof). He emphasizes the importance of academia as a realm for the passionate scholar, rather than the careerist. Regarding shame, Cohen provides evidence published by Ithaka that although most scholars find research online, many still claim not to value open, online publishing as much as they value the status of a journal. And in a bid for academic narcissism, Cohen reminds his readers that open access publishing does in fact attract a much larger readership than toll access publishing does. Cohen suggests that the current scholarly communication system is broken and biased; that academics are committed to the pursuit and sharing of knowledge; that academics are not acting in their own self-interest; and that open access publishing is a much more effective mode of knowledge sharing.

Coughlan, Rosarie, and Mark Swartz. 2020. “An Overview of the Open Access Movement in Canada.” In Open Praxis, Open Access: Digital Scholarship in Action, edited by Darren Chase and Dana Haugh, 19–40. Chicago: American Library Association.

Coughlan and Swartz provide an overarching look at the state of open access in Canada. The authors suggest that there has been good momentum so far—citing the Tri-Agency Policy on Open Access to Publications, Canada’s participation in the Open Government Partnership, the Canadian Scholarly Publishing Working Group, and the Copyright Law review—but that Canada still has some distance to go before the country becomes a leading force in the open access world. Coughlan and Swartz recommend that Canada take further concrete steps, including transforming the Tri-Agency Policy on Open Access to law and doing away with Crown Copyright, in order to more fully support and facilitate open scholarship nationwide.

ElSabry, ElHassan. 2017. “Claims About Benefits of Open Access to Society (Beyond Academia).” In Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Electronic Publishing, edited by Leslie Chan and Fernando Loizides. 34–43. Amsterdam: IOS Press Ebooks.

ElHassan ElSabry studies the language used in open access declarations, policies, and editorials in order to ascertain which main reasons are given in open access advocacy. To do so, he studies a corpus of 164 of these sorts of documents. ElSabry concludes that journal editors are more prone to highlighting the benefits to authors (e.g., citation and professional impact), whereas governments and funding bodies tend to highlight broader and more abstract benefits to society.

Eve, Martin Paul. 2014. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and the Future. Cambridge University Press.

The Open Access movement is often discussed in relation to the sciences only; Eve shifts the common rhetoric to focus on the humanities. Open access, Eve argues, is not only relevant to, but in fact crucial for, the humanities. Although the humanities and sciences differ in many ways, open access practices from the sciences can be translated and applied—as appropriate—for the humanities. To illustrate his thinking, Eve walks through the key arguments for and against open access in the humanities: publication, peer review, monographs, economics, and licenses. He admits that open access can be fraught in each of these areas, which makes large-scale implementation challenging. Eve suggests that a possible solution is an open access system in which major libraries come together to negotiate, buy, and make available published material; he also advocates for open, post-publication peer review and the overlay journal. Throughout, Eve implicitly advocates for a humanities-centred approach to open access.

Eve, Martin Paul. 2015. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Communication in Non-Scientific Disciplines.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 717–32. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-04-2015-0103

Eve presents an overview of the current open access debate in non-scientific (STEM) disciplines, arguing that non-STEM disciplines have consistently lagged behind in their approach to open access policies and practices. He attributes this gap to a variety of economic and cultural factors, and argues that these specific challenges or objections have stunted the growth of open access in these disciplines. Eve suggests that his article is far too short and biased to do justice to the complexity of the issues he raises; however, it is his hope that the insights therein spur action and critical appraisal from the community at large. Academia needs to consider what is needed from a scholarly communications infrastructure and simultaneously build pragmatic and non-damaging transition strategies in order to utilize open access dissemination to its full advantage.

Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray. 2020. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Politics, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Eve and Gray draw together various chapters on the current and future state of scholarly communication, especially in relation to open access and open scholarship movements. The editors incorporate perspectives from around the globe, with an emphasis on critical approaches to open scholarship endeavours and activities. For instance, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou argues that open access can be quite detrimental in Africa, where the pressure to publish in English in a foreign open access journal reinscribes a colonial approach to knowledge production in its waylaying of local and/or Indigenous knowledge creation and sharing. Throughout the collection, the common message seems to be that open scholarship is largely a positive movement, but that there are numerous facets that require careful consideration in order not to replicate existing inequities in academia.

Eve, Martin Paul, Saskia C. J. de Vries and Johan Rooryck. 2017. “The Transition to Open Access: The State of the Market, Offsetting Deals, and a Demonstrated Model for Fair Open Access with the Open Library of Humanities.” In Expanding Perspectives on Open Science: Communities, Cultures and Diversity in Concepts and Practices. Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Electronic Publishing, edited by Leslie Chan and Fernando Loizides, 118–28. Amsterdam: IOS Press Ebooks.

Eve et al. explore gold open access practices, especially in the Netherlands. They point out that commercial publishers worldwide are still guaranteeing their journal revenue in open access scenarios, either by subscriptions to hybrid journals, article processing charges (APCs), or some combination thereof. The authors then offer a case study alternative to such practices: LingOA, a group of linguistics journals that have agreed to fair open access practices. Eve et al. argue that the current approach to open access has led to a confusing and uncoordinated system; one that has done nothing to recoup library budgets currently monopolized by journal subscriptions. The authors suggest that in order to “flip” to a fully open access system, the LingOA model may be implemented, based as it is on consortial agreements, fair practices, and copyright remaining with authors.

Finch, Janet. 2012. Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications [Finch Report]. Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings.

Finch explores the current state of academic publishing in the United Kingdom and makes recommendations for increasing access to research output. She takes a largely conservative stance, and her arguments stray from the reigning opinions in the open access world for appropriate and effective approaches to remedying the scholarly communication system. Whereas most open access advocates argue for the coordinated funding and provision of repositories (green open access), Finch suggests that the only reasonable way to implement an open access scholarly communication system would be to shift all of the resources to an article processing charge, author-pays gold open access system. She also contests funding agencies’ requirement that embargo periods are shortened to six months. Although Finch claims the above recommendations represent a balanced solution to an issue with multiple stakeholders who often have conflicting priorities, she largely comes down on the side of publishers, and on ensuring there is no potential loss to their revenue streams.

Francabandera, Laura. 2020. “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Open Access and Intersectionality.” In Open Praxis, Open Access: Digital Scholarship in Action, edited by Darren Chase and Dana Haugh, 57–68. Chicago: American Library Association.

Francabandera questions whether the Open Access movement is truly an arbiter of social justice as has been claimed. She suggests that by taking an intersectional approach to assessing open access, one can see that the movement has far to go when it comes to equity. Francabandera bases this suggestion primarily on a study of the representation of Black women within open access research.

Fund, Sven. 2015. “Will Open Access Change the Game?: Hypotheses on the Future Cooperation of Libraries, Researchers, and Publishers.” Bibliothek 39 (2): 206–09.

Fund insists that a study on the economic, social, and infrastructural impact of a major scholarly communication transition is needed, post-haste. He argues that the postsecondary system should proceed with caution when it comes to open access, as such a transition may have negative economic effects. Although physicists and other science communities have been sharing their work open access since the late 1980s, Fund considers the Open Access movement to be only a decade old, beginning with the signing of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003). Regardless of this truncated history, Fund comments that open access has the potential to become a disruptive technology, akin to those seen in software and hardware development over the last couple of decades.

Gargouri, Yassine, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Larivière, Yves Gringas, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad. 2010. “Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research.” PLoS ONE 5 (10). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0013636

Gargouri, Hajjem, Larivière, Gringas, Carr, Brody, and Harnad compare the relative impact of open access and non-open access articles that are archived in a repository because of mandate or due to self-selection. Gargouri et al.’s goal is to test the self-selection bias hypothesis, in regard to what is known as the Open Access (OA) Advantage, and they cite the various articles that purport this hypothesis. The Open Access Advantage is the tested proof that archiving a research article in an open access repository increases its citation count. Those who argue that a self-selection bias is at play contest that these articles are cited more frequently because authors primarily archive their best or most citable work (and so these articles would be cited more often anyway). Based on their findings, the authors conclude that self-selected archived articles (author choice) are not necessarily cited more often than mandated archived articles (no author choice). Thus, the self-selection bias hypothesis does not apply.

Government of Canada. 2015. “Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications.” Science.gc.ca. https://www.science.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=F6765465-1

The Government of Canada lays out its approach and attitude toward research sharing and dissemination, funneled through the Tri-Agency (the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [CIHR], the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [NSERC], and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [SSHRC]). The goal of this document is to convince researchers to make their output openly available, as well as to formalize the government’s position on the issue. The stated objective is to improve access to the results of Tri-Agency-funded research, as well as to increase the sharing, circulation, and exchange of research results.

Grimme, Sara, Mike Taylor, Michael A. Elliott, Cathy Holland, Peter Potter, and Charles Watkinson. 2019. “The State of Open Monographs.” Digital Science. https://doi.org/10.6084/M9.FIGSHARE.8197625

Grimme, Taylor, Elliott, Holland, Potter, and Watkinson survey the open monograph landscape as of 2019. They argue that although there has been an increase in open access monographs produced, there are further activities that could be undertaken to improve and support the production and proliferation of such texts. Namely, the report compilers suggest that publishers improve their digital asset management practices for open monographs by ensuring all digital monographs are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) upon publication, that there is sufficient metadata linked to each monograph, and that XML is integrated into the publication workflow. Overall, Grimme et al. suggest that the state of open monographs looks promising but there is room for improvement as well.

Harnad, Stevan. 2011. “Open Access is a Research Community Matter, Not a Publishing Community Matter.” Lifelong Learning in Europe XVI (2): 117–18.

Harnad argues that green open access via repository deposit is the best path toward the widespread adoption and implementation of open access. He aims to convince researchers to self-archive or deposit their own output because publishers do not yet have enough impetus to commit wholly to open access. Harnad reminds his readers that publishers are supposed to be serving the academy, not the other way around.

Harnad, Stevan. 2015. “Optimizing Open Access Policy.” The Serials Librarian 69: 133–41.

Harnad offers an overview of the current open access landscape as well as suggestions for how to achieve worldwide open access to research. He argues for a coordinated, multi-step approach across all funding bodies and institutions; specifically, Harnad suggests that the most effective path to universal open access is via mandated institutional repositories or green open access. He demonstrates how the article processing charge model has perpetuated the current unsustainable scholarly communication norms rather than offered a tenable alternative, as many universities now pay article processing charges for authors as well as maintain their subscriptions to journals. By contrast, green open access reduces the amount of capital flowing to external publishers, and gives authors and institutions more bargaining power, as they also hold public copies of research content and the means to share it. Harnad suggests that all funding bodies and universities must mandate green open access in order to achieve it.

+ Heath, Malcolm, Michael Jubb, and David Robey. 2008. “E-Publication and Open Access in the Arts and Humanities in the UK.” Ariadne 54: n.p. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/heath-et-al/ Archived at https://perma.cc/NKM4-E3T5

Heath, Jubb, and Robey present an overview of the role of monographs, e-texts, and other e-books in arts and humanities-related disciplines. Monographs are still relatively unpopular for open access publication in the humanities since many people find these difficult to read and prefer the printed form. The survey uses as its principal object the activities of the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Research Information Network (RIN) to highlight a range of issues with open access monographs, journals, repositories, electronic publication of theses, and data publication. The authors point to the success of JSTOR as an open access repository; it is well known, however, that JSTOR requires libraries to pay a substantial subscription fee for access. The survey suggests that there is limited, slow progress to changing attitudes toward electronic publication. The academic community needs to develop a broader and more well-informed dialogue about its needs in regard to digital publication, and the issues endemic to publishing a monograph electronically.

Heller, Margaret, and Franny Gaede. 2016. “Measuring Altruistic Impact: A Model for Understanding the Social Justice of Open Access.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 4: eP2132. https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.2132

Heller and Gaede make a library-based argument for open access, but their premise is unique. The authors move beyond the standard argument that open access is a public good (and de facto social issue), so should be adopted universally. Rather, they intend to demonstrate that the impact of open access institutional repositories can be measured in regards to social justice reach, rather than more common, pragmatic ways of proving impact like download and citation counts. The authors argue that it behooves librarians to increase open access collections of social justice materials in order to serve a larger international audience that includes potentially marginalized or lower income countries, and that social justice impact is possible through collection development. Moreover, Heller and Gaede suggest, this altruistic work brings institutional repositories in line with the social justice-oriented missions of many universities.

Ψ Huang, Chun-Kai, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Lucy Montgomery, Katie Wilson, Alkim Ozaygen, Chloe Brookes-Kenworth. 2020. “Evaluating Institutional Open Access Performance: Methodology, Challenges and Assessment.” bioRxiv. https://doi.org/ 10.1101/2020.03.19.998336

Huang et al. conducted an institution-level analysis of open access publishing at research-intensive universities around the world to determine whether open access policies have noticeable effects. They gathered data from several databases about open access articles published in 2017, then calculated the percentage of open access publications relative to total publications at each of the 2,107 universities represented. The percentage was tracked over time against policy changes, such as the implementation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the United Kingdom in 2015. This method revealed the effect of policy changes on open access publishing, especially in the United Kingdom, where policies mandating open access and funding increases are associated with a noticeable increase in open access publication, particularly through repository-mediated green open access. However, levels of gold open access publication peak at around 40% across the sample of universities. The authors note several challenges to achieving 100% open access, including disciplinary conventions. In the humanities, for instance, its emphasis on books makes achieving total open access difficult. They also conclude that policies that are monitored for compliance and sanction non-compliance show the greatest effect on open access publication rates.

Lorimer, Rowland. 2014a. “A Good Idea, a Difficult Reality: Toward a Publisher/Library Open Access Partnership.” Scholarly and Research Communication 5 (4). src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/180

Lorimer acknowledges the complexities of scholarly communication and offers opinions on the positions that different national players should play in this arena. He is very clear on who scholarly publishers are: “capitalists who transform drafts of research reports into effective communications directed at certain audiences” (3). Lorimer maintains that publishers add considerable value to research output, and by extension benefit its creators and consumers. His goal is to convince readers of the value of distinct, arms-length scholarly publishers, as well as the need for objective study into successful open access models of knowledge dissemination and a reevaluation of current, institutional activities that facilitate open access. Lorimer offers an analysis of historical precedents to national information sharing (e.g., public broadcasting in Canada), and focuses on lessons learned from systems that have generated immense wealth for specific private groups. He also deliberates on the value of current national approaches to open access publishing such as the growing number of institutional repositories. Lorimer argues that institutional repositories compromise scholarly publishing because they facilitate the archival of different versions of research output. Moreover, Lorimer brings attention to the lack of a sophisticated regulatory framework, which could potentially quell the activities of predatory publishers. Finally, he offers seven priorities that Canada needs to uphold in order to support a robust academic publishing system.

Lorimer, Rowland. 2014b. “Open Access Publishing and Academic Research.” In Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Content Online, edited by Rosemary J. Coombe, Darren Wershler, and Martin Zeilinger, 177–88. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lorimer glosses the state of open access academic publishing, with a specific focus on the humanities. He draws attention to the pragmatic question of how university libraries can keep up with mounting subscription costs, as well as the philosophical question of who should dictate the terms of research production and dissemination. Lorimer’s review method is to survey the history of corporate journal publishing, the resulting emergence of open access, and the current state of open access humanities research in Canada. This narrative approach provides a historical background to the current tensions between open access and non-open access academic publishing.

Φ McGregor, Heidi, and Kevin Guthrie. 2015. “Delivering Impact of Scholarly Information: Is Access Enough?” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3). https://doi.org/ 10.3998/3336451.0018.302 (Φ Open Social Scholarship > Open Scholarship)

Φ + † Meadows, Alice. 2015. “Beyond Open: Expanding Access to Scholarly Content.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 18 (3): n.p. https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0018.301 (Φ Open Social Scholarship > Open Scholarship)

Ψ Moore, Samuel A. 2020. “Revisiting ‘the 1990s Debutante’: Scholar-led Publishing and the Prehistory of the Open Access Movement.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 71: 856–866. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24306

Moore explores the prehistory of open access publishing in the humanities and social sciences through a critical-theoretical analysis of humanities and social sciences publishing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today the dominant variety of open access publishing is that popularised by scientific publishers and formalized in the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) Declaration. The humanities, Mandler claimed in his paper “Open Access,” were latecomers to open access publishing. To disprove this claim, Moore conducts his analysis and highlights practices unique to humanities and social sciences publishing such as critique of commercial practices, experimental design, and the exploration of power relationships between publisher, scholar, and community. These practices, he says, are once again becoming the focus of debates around issues such as researcher control and experimentation. Because of this, Moore concludes that if policymakers, advocates, and publishing scholars are to make wise decisions, they must know not only the more popular practices of the sciences but also those practices that, forming in the early days of open access, continue to shape humanities and social sciences publishing today.

Morrison, Heather. 2017. “From the Field: Elsevier as an Open Access Publisher.” The Charleston Advisor 18 (3): 53–59. https://doi.org/10.5260/chara.18.3.53

Morrison explores Elsevier’s current open access practices, and the feasibility of transitioning Elsevier to a full open access publisher. She concludes that although Elsevier has boosted its quantity of full and hybrid open access journals substantially in recent years (511 full open access and 2,149 hybrid open access journals), it is unlikely that the publisher will become a fully open access venture, as it would miss out on substantial revenue that could not feasibly be recovered through article processing charges alone. Further, Morrison draws attention to copyright practices that she considers to be deceptive: Elsevier employs a nominal author copyright, which in effect positions the author as a third-party user of their own research and still retains all copyright to the work. Overall, Morrison warns that pursuing a global flip to open access via committing to article processing charges is unlikely to succeed and should be considered more cautiously.

Morrison, Heather, Leslie Chan, Olivier Charbonneau, Andrew Feenberg, Michael A. Geist, Stevan Harnad, Marjorie Mitchell, B. F. Francis Ouellette, Richard Smith, Donald Taylor, Samuel Trosow, Christian Vandendorpe, and Andrew Waller. 2010. Require Open Access to Results of Research Funded by Canadian Taxpayer. Submission to Industry Canada Digital Economy Consultation.

Morrison, Chan, Charbonneau, Feenberg, Geist, Harnad, Mitchell, Ouellette, Smith, Taylor, Trosow, Vandendorpe, and Waller recommend that the Canadian government adopt a policy that requires open access to research output in Canada. They argue that a coordinated approach to open access would lead to widespread knowledge transfer across sectors. The primary goal of this report is to suggest that all funded research should be required to be deposited in institutional repositories—a common recommendation from open access advocates due to the opportunities that a network of repositories might offer, including global interconnectivity and freedom from corporate control. Morrison et al. outline five key points in their recommendation: fairness (taxpayers have a right to read the research they fund); international ranking (other countries’ open access positions are more developed than Canada’s); ease of implementation (many open access repositories are available already); scholarly interest (Canadian open access initiatives already exist); and global citizenship (the state of academic publishing in Canada requires evolution in order to compete and contribute internationally). Overall, the authors emphasize the necessity of mandating open access instead of merely encouraging or requesting it.

Nkoudou, Thomas Herve Mboa. 2020. “Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon.” In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Politics, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray, 25–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nkoudou considers how the Open Access movement has played out on the African continent, with specific focus on sub-Saharan countries. He argues that open access is not necessarily an unfettered good in these regions, unlike the popular social good/equalizing/emancipatory qualities many open access advocates have claimed for years. Rather, Nkoudou suggests, open access has increased access to Western research and heralded in profit-making strategies like article processing charges that have further excluded researchers outside of North American and European contexts. He concludes that in order to redesign open access to truly benefit all, researchers need to emphasize epistemic justice and a decolonial approach to knowledge production and sharing.

+ Pinfield, Stephen. 2015. “Making Open Access Work: The ‘State-of-the-Art’ in Providing Open Access to Scholarly Literature.” Online Information Review 39 (5): 604–36. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2015-0167

Twenty years into the movement, Pinfield examines the challenges that still plague open access scholarship. Despite the growth of open access, Pinfield asserts that barriers to universal acceptance remain, namely significant levels of disinterest, suspicion, and scepticism among researchers. Much of the debate amongst open access advocates and other people, he argues, assumes that different types of open access frameworks (like green versus gold) are rivals. The author believes that popular understanding of open access needs to be further developed and uses the Research Information Network’s 2014 report as a framework for understanding the problems of accessibility, availability, usage, and financial sustainability of open access publication. Overall, the key issue of open access is transforming policy into practice—it is not a question of whether or not information should be open, but rather a question of how.

Piron, Florence. 2018. “Postcolonial Open Access.” In Open Divide. Critical Studies in Open Access, edited by Ulrich Herb and Joachim Schopfel, 117–28. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.

Piron considers the benefits and drawbacks of open access in the Global South, with specific focus on Haiti and Francophone Africa. Piron argues that open access has not, in fact, created more equitable access to knowledge as many advocates have claimed. Rather, she suggests, open access has become a neocolonial tool, as it has only increased access to research from the Global North, and only for those who have access to the Internet or research databases. Piron recommends decolonizing open access so that research from around the world is valued and accessible to all, in ways that are appropriate to and make sense for diverse local contexts.

Rentier, Bernard. 2016. “Open Science: A Revolution in Sight?” Interlending & Document Supply 44 (4): 155–60.

Rentier argues that the academy is still holding fast to traditional practices like closed peer review and prestige-based publishing even in the face of better options. The author also comments on the open access policy at his own institution, the Université de Liège, which was enacted in 2007. The Université de Liége requires all faculty to deposit publications in their institutional repository. Decisions regarding promotion, funding, and space allocations are made entirely based on repository records instead of separate curricula vitae or applications. This relatively strict institutional policy has been very successful at the Université de Liége, and a 2015 faculty survey revealed that 91% of respondents are satisfied with the process. For Rentier, digital technologies provide many more choices for open practices and academics need to take advantage of them in order to create a more ethical and efficient scholarly communication system.

Ψ Robinson-Garcia N., Costas R., van Leeuwen T. N. 2020. “Open Access Uptake by Universities Worldwide.” PeerJ 8: e9410. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.9410

Robinson-Garcia, Costas, and van Leeuwen use bibliometric analysis to determine the share of research outputs published open access worldwide at the institutional level. Noting that indicators for measuring the impact of open science policies are essential, this study provides a model for analyzing publication data at this level of granularity that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of policy at various levels and offers a descriptive overview of institutional and national open access practices. Using the list of universities from the 2019 Leiden Rankings and its disciplinary categories, the authors collected publication data for all of each university’s publications from Web of Science and cross-referenced it against Unpaywall to gather information about its open access status and type. Notably, because this dataset includes publications with digital object identifiers (DOIs) only, social science and humanities publications are likely underrepresented. The authors found that, of the more than 4.6 million publications examined, about 41% were open access. Most were green open access, followed by gold, bronze, and hybrid. The shares of research published open access varied widely between countries and between institutions within a country. There was some evidence of the impact of open access policies, such as United Kingdom universities having the highest percentage of open access publications overall, likely the result of its Research Evaluation Framework and related policies, and the precedence of gold open access over green open access in Brazilian universities, likely the result of that country’s SciELO program. By describing the prevalence of open access in institutions around the world and presenting a method for analyzing this data, this study lays the groundwork for future investigations.

Rodriguez, Allyson. 2017. “Collaboration in Scholarly Communication: Opportunities to Normalize Open Access.” College & Research Libraries News 78 (5): 270.

Rodriguez details how librarians can promote an open access agenda and educate faculty members about scholarly communication practices and pragmatics. She suggests that there are three main areas where librarians can promote open access: outreach and education; highlighting and celebrating; and acquisitions. In order for open access to become normalized, scholarly communication librarians must actively engage their librarian and faculty colleagues on campus.

Sale, Arthur, Marc Couture, Eloy Rodrigues, Les Carr, and Stevan Harnad. 2014. “Open Access Mandates and the ‘Fair Dealing’ Button.” In Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online, edited by Rosemary J. Coombe and Darren Wershler, 189–200. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sale et al. explore one approach to implementing open access practices and policies: the fair dealing button. The fair dealing button is an add-on to institutional repositories developed out of the longstanding tradition of individuals writing to authors to request a copy of their article. When authors deposit a closed-access article in a repository, all that is available for others to see is the article’s metadata. With a fair dealing button, users can still review the metadata but can also generate an automated request to the author for access to the full article. Even if an article is closed-access, the fair dealing button provides the reader with a single copy of the article for personal, research, creative, or journalistic use. Sale et al. call this process “almost open access” (191), and they argue that the fair dealing button makes open access mandates more feasible. For the authors, this is an effective, streamlining strategy for green open access and repository deposit more generally: institutions could mandate that all articles are deposited upon or just prior to publication—regardless of their status as open, closed, or embargoed—as any closed access copies could be made available upon request.

Shearer, Kathleen. 2011. “Comprehensive Brief on Open Access to Publications and Research Data for the Federal Granting Agencies.” Ottawa: Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. https://policycommons.net/artifacts/1229984/comprehensive-brief-on-open-access-to-publications-and-research-data-for-the-federal-granting-agencies/1783057/

Shearer reviews what other nations with similar economic conditions to Canada are doing to support open access. In particular, she looks at Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States (although she also considers pan-European activities at times). According to Shearer, the United Kingdom has dedicated the most resources to this area and is well on its way to building a robust open access infrastructure. By contrast, Canada has expressed goodwill in this area but lacks tangible, coordinated, national policy, legislation, or infrastructure. Overall, Shearer cites the economic possibilities of open access, as well as the progressive policies and supportive activities of other countries and the importance of informed consumers alongside informed citizens.

Solomon, David J., and Bo-Christer Björk. 2012. “Publication Fees in Open Access Publishing: Sources of Funding and Factors Influencing Choice of Journal.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63 (1): 98–107.

Solomon and Björk share the results of their study on authors who have recently paid article processing charges to publish open access journal articles. Their goal is to ascertain the likelihood of article processing charges becoming a common, successful practice for open access journals. To do so they survey authors who have published in academic journals recently, and they compare their findings to previous surveys of a similar nature. Solomon and Björk develop a matrix to determine the most important factors for author choice of journal and conclude that authors prioritize journals that are within the scope of their research and that are perceived to be of high quality. Whether a journal is open access is less important to the group sampled. By surveying authors, Solomon and Björk attempt to present an evidence-based case for the future success of article processing charges.

Suber, Peter. 2011. “Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access.” In Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Suber takes a measured approach to detailing the open access landscape and likening it to a commons. He details the difference between royalty-free and royalty-producing content and suggests some options for convincing those who make royalties off of their academic work to consider switching to an open access model. He also discusses the three major stalemates in the transition to open access: 1) open access will save universities money, but not until they have transitioned away from the old scholarly communication model; 2) universities may fear that they are paving the way for “freeloading” universities to reap the benefits later; 3) toll access journals are often perceived as more prestigious, and so attract more established scholars. Throughout the chapter Suber details challenges to the Open Access movement such as the above and offers solutions.

Suber, Peter. 2016. Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Suber collects a number of posts from his newsletter, which started as the “Free Online Scholarship Newsletter” and was renamed the “SPARC Open Access Newsletter” when Suber was hired by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in 2003. He provides a lengthy collection that spans over a decade of thinking and reporting on the Open Access movement. Primarily, Suber speaks on the American context, but he comments on happenings in Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom as well. He discusses a range of issues, including peer review, publisher negotiations, and the formation of the Open Access movement. Overall Suber sheds light on the development and legacy of the Open Access movement.

Suber, Peter. 2012. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/9780262517638_Open_Access_PDF_Version.pdf

Within the context of the transition to open access publishing models in the academy, Suber offers a general overview of what open access to research is. Such a transition requires the active support of university administrators, funding agencies, and policy writers, and Suber aims to provide these individuals with an easily digestible accounting of the movement. To reach this goal he provides a set of definitions, a survey of the field, and a quick, palatable argument for open access. Suber is not outwardly radical in his premise or approach, but he does call for a rethinking of scholarly production to benefit authors and readers rather than intermediaries.

Suber, Peter. 2010. “Thoughts on Prestige, Quality, and Open Access.” Logos 21 (1): 115–28. https://doi.org/10.1163/095796510X546959

Suber unpacks the relationship between prestige and journal publishing. He argues that, despite suggestions to the contrary, the institutional emphasis on prestige in the academy does not have to be a barrier to open access, which many feel is not as prestigious as toll access publishing. Prestige is not an obstacle to green open access, as authors may have the option to deposit pre- or post-prints of their toll access articles in repositories. But prestige is more of a challenge for gold open access, and Suber explains that many toll access journals are viewed as more prestigious simply because they have been established for longer, so have built up a standard of quality that is self-fulfilling. Some open access journals have also reached this degree of prestige, and more will as they age and become more established (and attract more authors). In the meantime, Suber suggests that universities re-assume the role of quality assurers, rather than allowing commercial publishers to suggest that research is of high quality due to its publication in (their) high-ranking journals.

+ Tanenbaum, Greg. 2014. “North American Campus-Based Open Access Funds: A Five-Year Progress Report.” SPARC. https://sparcopen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/OA-Fund-5-Year-Review.pdf

Tanenbaum provides an overview of the successes and challenges of campus-based open access funds across North America. The report provides quantitative data to show how the funds have encouraged authors to get involved with open access publishing. It also includes a qualitative analysis of the successes, challenges, level of satisfaction, and communication with faculty and administration. The author notes that launching funds at more institutions will highlight the impact of this mechanism on scholarly communication and adds that “SPARC anticipates an ongoing involvement in campus-based Open Access Funds” (5).

Ψ Tennant, Jonathan P. 2016. “The Academic, Economic and Societal Impacts of Open Access: An Evidence-Based Review.” F1000Research.

Noting that open access has become a pressing issue worldwide but that little consensus exists about its benefits and drawbacks, Tennant, Waldner, Jacques, Masuzzo, Collister, and Hartgerink synthesize research on its academic, economic, and societal impacts and present a brief history of the Open Access movement. Benefits to academics include greater access to research and greater impact as measured through citation counts (although this citation advantage varies widely by discipline) and altmetrics. Open access also enables text and data mining, which allows researchers to synthesize findings at scale, scan the literature for errors, and streamline literature searches. Economic impacts are felt primarily by publishers, who bear the costs associated with publishing research. Many alternative publishing models have arisen, including the pay-to-publish model, which levies article processing charges and is a widespread alternative to the traditional subscription model, but article processing charges can put at a disadvantage early career researchers, those in lower income countries, and those without research funding. Examining the societal impacts of open access emphasizes that research has value beyond academia, such as for businesses, research and development departments, and medical patients. Access to knowledge is widely regarded as a human right, and many have argued that publicly funded research should be publicly available. The authors note that open access is part of the larger Open Science movement, which also comprises open data. They conclude with the finding that most researchers would publish their work open access if funders or employers required them to do so but emphasize that open access is a complex issue within the equally complex system of scholarly publishing.

Willinsky, John. 2006. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. MIT Press.

Within the context of inequitable access to knowledge and rising journal subscription costs, Willinsky aims to make a compelling case for open access. He focuses on scholarly journals, in particular, but he does consider the larger scholarly production ecosystem as well. Willinsky argues that knowledge is a public good, and as such the public should have unequivocal access to it. He paints a picture of inequitable global access to research, which effectively widens the wealth and knowledge gap between developing and developed nations. Overall, Willinsky posits open access as a more just and fair choice for scholarly knowledge production, citing its role in facilitating shared decision making between experts and non-experts.

Φ Willinsky, John. 2007. “What Open Access Research Can Do for Wikipedia.” First Monday 12 (3): n.p. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/1624/1539?inline=1 (Φ Public & Community Engagement > Social Knowledge Creation, including Wikipedia & Crowdsourcing)

Open Data

+ Anokwa, Yaw, Carl Hartung, Waylon Brunette, Gaetano Boriello, and Adam Lerer. 2009. “Open Source Data Collection in the Developing World.” Computer 42 (10): 97–99. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5280663&tag=1

Anokwa, Hartung, Brunette, Boriello, and Lerer, all members of the Open Data Kit (ODK) development team, present evidence for how the ODK can be used for accessible data collection in the developing world. The authors suggest that current services are inflexible, closed source, and based on closed standards. When this article was published in 2009, the Open Data Kit had not yet been developed as a tool, and the authors provide arguments for funding agencies to give consideration to their proposal. As a case study, the authors discuss Ampath Kenya, the most comprehensive initiative in the country to combat HIV. Ampath opted to use the Open Data Kit to improve their methods of data collection and retrieval. The ODK research team argues that the ability to collect data is key to the success of many organizations in the developing world.

+ Bauer, Florian, and Martin Kaltenböck. 2012. Linked Open Data: The Essentials. Vienna: edition mono/monochrom. https://www.reeep.org/sites/default/files/LOD-the-Essentials_0.pdf

Bauer and Kaltenböck write a guide for administrators describing how to wisely manage and use linked open data. The guide provides basic definitions that clarify the differences between open data and linked open data. The authors expound on the industrial potential of using the linked approach and provide advice and examples on how to start a linked open data catalogue. Bauer and Kaltenböck select the reegle.info country profiles, United Kingdom legislation, and Open EI definitions as representative of larger linked open data trends. The authors articulate a vision that depicts how these tools can be used to create the semantic web of the future. The guide provides links to web resources and uses visual graphs to simplify the process of linking and cataloguing data.

Φ + Bradley, Jean-Claude, Robert J. Lancashire, Andrew SID Lang, and Anthony J. Williams. 2009. “The Spectral Game: Leveraging Open Data and Crowd-Sourcing for Education.” Journal of Cheminformatics 1 (9): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-1-9 (Φ Public & Community Engagement > Social Knowledge Creation, including Wikipedia & Crowdsourcing)

Davies, Tim. 2010. “Open Data, Democracy and Public Sector Reform. A Look at Open Government Data Use from Data.gov.uk.” Open Data Impacts. http://www.opendataimpacts.net/report/

Davies explores the use of open government data (OGD) from the United Kingdom website data.gov.uk. The author begins with a theoretical discussion of open government data by arguing that the digital turn has undermined the government’s monopoly on data processing and interpretation. By contrast, the open data movement aspires to promote transparency and accountability by empowering citizens. In this exploratory case study, Davies details who uses open government data, how the data are being used, and the potential implications they have on the public sector. This empirical study uses a variety of research methods and draws on survey, interview, and participant-observation data. Overall, Davies found that open government data were used by an overwhelmingly male audience with occupations in the private sector, public sector, and academic institutions. The use of open data generally fell into five categories: data to fact, data to information, data to interface, data to data, and data to service. This study highlights real-world, practical uses of open government data and lays the groundwork for future research to test the adequacy and applicability of Davies’ typologies.

Di Noia, Tommaso, Roberto Mirizzi, Vito Claudio Ostuni, Davide Romito, and Markus Zanker. 2012. “Linked Open Data to Support Content-Based Recommender Systems.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Semantic Systems, 1–8. New York: ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2362501

Di Noia, Mirizzi, Ostuni, Romito, and Zanker analyze the open data approach for supporting content-based recommender systems. The research team performs an evaluation of MovieLens: the historical dataset for movie recommender systems. The researchers link this data to DBpedia datasets and perform one-to-one mapping. Evidence shows that 298 of 3,952 mappings in MovieLens have no correspondence with DBpedia. Their content-based recommender system leverages the knowledge encoded in the semantic datasets of linked open data with DBpedia, Freebase, and LinkedMDB to collect metadata (such as actors, directors, or genres) on movies.

+ Geiger, Christian P., and Jorn von Lucke. 2012. “Open Government and (Linked) (Open) (Government) (Data).” eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government 4 (2): 265–78. https://doi.org/10.29379/jedem.v4i2.143

Geiger and von Lucke explore free usage of stored public sector data. The authors state that it is not enough to simply put data online; data need to be considered and weighed, and a determination must be made regarding if and where the data can be published. Geiger and von Lucke describe different types of machine readable and open formats for data. The Open Data movement currently faces difficulty with different national and international laws about access and transparency. The authors argue that a fair balance between the interests of individual authors, publishers, and the general public must be reached. Misinterpretation by third parties, as well as the structure and culture of the public sector, are further difficulties faced by open data directives. Administrations and individual actors should cooperate with each other to achieve sustainability of open government data communities.

+ Gurstein, Michael B. 2011. “Open Data: Empowering the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone?” First Monday 16 (2): n.p. https://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/open-data-empowering-the-empowered or-effective-data-use-for-everyone/ Archived at https://perma.cc/KZ2U-PRRU

Gurstein is supportive of the open data project but maintains that the impact on poor and marginalized communities must be investigated. Policy should ensure that there is a wide basis of opportunity for effective data use. He uses Solly Benjamin’s research on the impact of digitization of land records in Bangalore as evidence of the potential for land surveyors, lawyers, and other high-ranking officials to exploit gaps in titles, take advantage of mistakes in documentation, and identify opportunities and targets for crimes. Gurstein creates a seven-point framework for making effective use of open data. This should be combined with training on computer/software use, accessible formatting of datasets, interpretation training, and a supportive advocacy network for the community.

+ Hartung, Carl, Adam Lerer, Yaw Anokwa, Clint Tseng, Waylon Brunette, and Gaetano Borriello. 2010. “Open Data Kit: Tools to Build Information Services for Developing Regions.” In ICDT ’10: Proceedings of the 4^th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2369220.2369236

Hartung, Lerer, Anokwa, Tseng, Brunette, and Borriello present the development of the Open Data Kit, which contains four tools: collect, aggregate, voice, and build. The collect platform renders complex application logic and supports the manipulation of data types. Aggregate performs a “click to deploy” server that supports data upload and storage transfer in the cloud. Voice renders application logic using automated phone prompts that the user responds to with the keypad. Build is a drag-and-drop application designer that generates logic used by the tools. The Open Data Kit was created to empower individuals and organizations and allow them to build services for distributing data in developing countries. The authors provide outlines of tool designs and charts of system architecture, a list of the drivers and clients employed by their program, and a list of organizations that support open source applications such as Open Data Kit. The tool uses a modular, extensible, and open source design to allow users to choose tools best suited for their own specific deployments.

+ Hausenblas, Michael, and Marcel Karnstedt. 2010. “Understanding Linked Open Data as a Web-Scale Database.” In 2010 Second International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications, 56–61. Menuires: IEEE Computer Society. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5477146

Hausenblas and Karnstedt compare linked open data to relational, web-scale databases. The authors provide general linked data principles and reference the linked open data community project to open their discussion and pose questions regarding the steps that should be taken to migrate parts of the relational database. Hausenblas and Karnstedt maintain that a database perspective is required for linked open data to ensure its acceptance and realize a low-barrier adoption process. The linked open data community needs to create specialized web-scale database engines made for the requirements of the linked open data cloud.

+ International Council for Science. 2015. Open Data in a Big Data World. Paris: International Council for Science (ICSU), International Social Science Council (ISSC), The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). https://council.science/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/open-data-in-big-data-world_long.pdf

The International Council for Science (ICSU), the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), and the International Social Science Council (ISSC), in the accord from the first Science International meeting, address the opportunities and challenges of data revolution in the realm of global science policy. They explain the digital revolution as a world-historical event, considering the amounts of data produced and their effect on the research industry. The authors characterize big data by volume, variety, velocity, and veracity. Another important element is linked data and its importance for the Semantic Web. The accord also addresses the open data imperative for various reasons. For example, when it comes to “self correction,” the openness and transparency of relevant data allow testing and reproducibility, whereby in terms of non-replicability, attempts of replicating data has been deemed rather unsuccessful, which again calls for transparency in the publication of data and metadata. The document also contains principles of open data, which include boundaries of openness, enabling practices, and responsibilities (of scientists; research institutions and universities; publishers; funding agencies; professional associations, scholarly societies, and academies; and libraries, archives, and repositories).

Johnson, Jeffrey Alan. 2014. “From Open Data to Information Justice.” Ethics and Information Technology 16 (4): 263–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-014-9351-8

Johnson argues that scholarly discussions of information justice should subsume the question of open data. His article examines the embedding of social privilege in datasets, the different capabilities of data users, and the norms that data systems impose through disciplinary functions. For Johnson, open data has potential to exacerbate rather than alleviate social injustices. Data sovereignty should trump open data and active pro-social countermeasures need to be taken to ensure ethical practices. Johnson calls for information pluralism, which would embrace, rather than problematize, the messiness of data. He argues that an information justice movement is vital for drumming up the participation necessary to make information pluralism a reality. Johnson calls for further inquiry into how existing social structures are perpetuated, exacerbated, and mitigated by information systems.

+ Piwowar, Heather A., and Todd J. Vision. 2013. “Data Reuse and the Open Data Citation Advantage.” PeerJ 1: e175. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.175

Piwowar and Vision argue that reusing data and opting for a data management policy that makes use of open citation are effective means of facilitating science. This type of policy allows these resources to circulate and contribute to discussions far beyond their original analysis. The authors discuss the advantages and challenges of making research publicly available. Piwowar and Vision conduct a small-scale manual review of citation contexts and use attribution, through mentions of data accession numbers, to explore patterns in data reuse on a larger scale. The researchers determine that data availability is associated with citation benefit and data reuse is a demonstrable component of citation benefit.

+ RECODE Project Consortium. 2014. “Policy Recommendations for Open Access to Research Data.” https://zenodo.org/record/50863/files/recode_guideline_en_web_version_full_FINAL.pdf

The Policy RECommendations for Open Access to Research Data in Europe (RECODE) Project Consortium provides an overview of the project and introduces the five interdisciplinary case studies in open access research data that helped in the examination of important challenges. The report includes a summary of the project findings and general recommendations. In addition, it studies targeted policies for funders, research institutions, data managers, and publishers, and provides practical guides for developing policies. The report also includes resources to further the policy development processes and their implementations. The authors conclude with a list of grouped resources and project partners.

Vision, Todd J. 2010. “Open Data and the Social Contract of Scientific Publishing.” BioScience 60 (5): 330–31. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2010.60.5.2

Vision considers open data and the social contract of scientific publishing. He begins with an appraisal of the scientific enterprise’s effectiveness for providing scientists with a means to publish their findings and receive credit for their work. To improve upon these standards, however, Vision believes that data need to be included in the arrangement, and that the printed page can no longer be the unit of measurement for attributing scholarship and research. Vision believes that publishers can assist this process by having journals require data archiving at the time of publication. Un-archived data files are often misplaced, corrupted, and rendered obsolete over time. Vision moves on to a discussion of Dryad: a tool that promotes data citations through assigning unique DOIs and compiling data in a shared repository. He concludes with the suggestion that permanent archives for research data would allow the social contract of publishing to give authors and their data their due.

Open Education

Broekman, Pauline van Mourik, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides, and Simon Worthington. 2015. Open Education: A Study in Disruption. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Broekman et al. provide a critical examination of the open education trend, with a focus on the United Kingdom. The authors consider the capitalist model and neoliberal ramifications of open education, as well as its creative possibilities. They argue that open education has the power to displace mid-sized universities through a process of outsourcing instructional labour, lessening the importance of students being physically present on a campus, building global university systems akin to industrial mergers, and defunding infrastructural and human resources costs related to bricks-and-mortar institutions. Broekman et al. also argue that open education, as it is developing en masse in North America, will not necessarily benefit the world’s general population, as it is purported to do; rather, it will line the pockets of academic-aligned corporations that are already making substantial profits at the expense of academic institutions.

Jhangiani, Rajiv Sunil. 2017. “Pragmatism vs. Idealism and the Identity Crisis of OER Advocacy.” Open Praxis 9 (2): 141–50. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.9.2.569

Jhangiani comments on the divide in the open education community between pragmatic and idealistic approaches to open educational resources (OERs). The pragmatists argue that OERs should be widely adopted because of the tangible, financial benefits for students; the idealists argue that they represent an opportunity for radical pedagogy. Jhangiani argues that, in fact, a hybrid approach is necessary. Divisiveness will not further the movement, to Jhangiani’s eyes; rather, open education advocates must present an argument that both acknowledges the significant cost benefit of OERs and incorporates opportunities for more experimental learning.

Jhangiani, Rajiv S., and Robert Biswas-Diener, eds. 2017. Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. Ubiquity Press.

Jhangiani and Biswas-Diener bring together 21 chapters and case studies on open scholarship, with a distinct focus on open education and open educational resources. There is a purposeful bent in the collection toward the critical value of open practices in academia, and this is emphasized in both the introduction and conclusion to the collection. Throughout the edited collection authors reiterate the moral imperative of open practices in academia, and encourage their uptake at national, governmental, institutional, and collegial levels. Many authors in the collection also reiterate the importance of moving beyond straightforward access to online scholarly or educational resources, into a space of deepened engagement or alternative academic methods.

Δ Veletsianos, George. 2021. “Open Educational Resources: Expanding Equity or Reflecting and Furthering Inequities?” Educational Technology Research and Development 69 (1): 407–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09840-y

Veletsianos argues that open educational resources (OERs), especially open textbooks, are a worthwhile response to consider during the shift to digital modes of teaching and learning, but he warns that, without scrutiny, such efforts may reflect or reinforce structural inequities. This scrutiny includes examining who creates OERs, who is and who is not represented in them, and who is cited in them to avoid reproducing structural inequities. Veletsianos concludes that OERs can be a mixed blessing, expanding inclusion and equity in areas like the cost of textbooks, but furthering inequities like a possible lack of diversity in the creation of OERs.

Wiley, David. 2014. “Defining the ‘Open’ in Open Content.” Open Content. https://www.opencontent.org/definition/

Wiley provides his definition of what open means in the context of open content and open educational resources. For Wiley, open content must engage in what he calls the 5R activities: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. He argues for the usage of less restrictive licenses, and notably contests the value of Creative Commons licenses like Share Alike (SA) or Non-Commercial (NC), which Wiley considers to be overly stringent. Further, he promotes the ALMS Framework—which encourages practitioners to ask questions in four categories (Access to Editing Tools; Level of Expertise Required; Meaningfully Editable; Self-Sourced)—for making technical choices that increase, rather than limit, the openness of content.