Category Archives: oa.values

How to cultivate good closures: ‘scaling small’ and the limits of openness | Samuel Moore

Posted on by
Reply

Text of a talk given to the COPIM end-of-project conference: “Scaling Small: Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books”, April 20th 2023.

Open access publishing has always had a difficult relationship with smoothness and scale. Openness implies seamlessness, limitlessness or structureless-ness – or the idea that the removal of price and permission barriers is what’s needed to allow research to reach its full potential. The drive for seamlessness is on display in much of the push for interoperability of standards and persistent identifiers that shape the infrastructures of openness. Throughout the evolution of open access, many ideas have been propagated around, for example, the necessity of CC BY as the one and only licence that facilitates this interoperability and smoothness of access and possible reuse. Similarly, failed projects such as One Repo sought to create a single open access repository to rule them all, in response to the perceived messy and stratified institutional and subject repository landscape.

Yet this relationship between openness and scale also leads to new kinds of closure, particularly the commercial closures of walled gardens that stretch across proprietary services and make researcher data available for increasing user surveillance. The economies of scale of commercial publishers require cookie-cutter production processes that remove all traces of care from publishing, in exchange for APCs and BPCs, thus ensuring that more publications can be processed cheaply with as little recourse to paid human labour as possible. Smoothness and scale are simply market enclosures by another name.

[…]

 

Final WP4 Report: Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on by
Reply

We are pleased to announce the release of the final report from COPIM’s Governance Work Package (WP4), titled Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers: Values, Practices, Barriers. This report develops some of the issues we have previously explored within COPIM with regard to community governance, such as the challenges of governing a collective and the relationship of governance to common resources, to explore how these apply in practice to the publication of books by small-to-medium Open Access publishers, as well as what barriers they have faced in implementing their governance models. It presents and discusses the results of six interviews with small and medium Open Access publishers from the ScholarLed consortium. It then offers some recommendations and insights into how other small and medium Open Access publishers might set up and/or improve their governance practices, including how the Open Book Collective and Open Book Futures project might support them in doing so.

Governing Scholar-Led OA Book Publishers was written by Dr. Judith Fathallah, with the kind assistance of the following interviewees:

François van Schalkwyk, Director of African Minds

Joe Deville, Co-Founder of Mattering Press

Jeff Pooley, Director of mediastudies.press

Mercedes Bunz, Co-Founder of meson press

Alessandra Tosi, Co-Director of Open Book Publishers

Eileen Joy, Co-Director of punctum books.

After a contextual discussion on the need for scholar-led OA publishers and governance issues related to the concept of the knowledge commons, the report presents the interview data. The publishers discuss the impetuses to startup their presses; incorporation and its forms; the elements, resources and actors in their governance structures; the evolution of governance structures and processes; their current mechanisms and procedures;t ransparency and self assessment; their relationships with institutions and organizations; and their perspectives on current governance.

Some reccomendations are then made to assist new publishers in considering their governance, and links to tools and resources provided.

The report has been published as a living document on COPIM’s Open Documentation Site (PubPub), and is also availabe as a time-stamped PDF version on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7801216.

 

New to the SCN: Publishing Values-based Scholarly Communication | OER + ScholComm

Posted on by
Reply

This is the latest post in a series announcing resources created for the Scholarly Communication Notebook, or SCN. The SCN is a hub of open teaching and learning content on scholcomm topics that is both a complement to an open book-level introduction to scholarly communication librarianship and a disciplinary and course community for inclusively sharing models and practices. IMLS funded the SCN in 2019, permitting us to pay creators for their labor while building a solid initial collection. These works are the result of one of three calls for proposals (our first CFP was issued in fall 2020; the second in late spring ‘21, and the third in late fall 2021).

 

Living Our Values and Principles: Annotated Bibliography | Educopia Institute

Posted on by

Community-based values and principles sit at the core of the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project, and members of our team have done extensive work over the past year researching and synthesizing the values and principles identified by individuals, organizations, and coalitions throughout the open knowledge community. In the course of developing the project and creating resources such as the draft Values and Principles Framework & Assessment Checklist and Living Our Values and Principles: Exploring Assessment Strategies for the Scholarly Communication Field, we found and reviewed dozens of values and principles statements, manifestos, articles, and book chapters spanning the worlds of scholarly communications, open data, open science, and open source software. 

In addition to informing our work on the project, we think the annotated bibliography that we’ve built along the way might be of use to others on similar journeys. To enable others to dig deeply into the articles and values statements contained within this annotated bibliography now and in the future, we are releasing it now as a formal publication. We will continue to add to this resource through the end of the NGLP project in August, 2022. If you find an article or values statement that you think would benefit this project, please reach out to Brandon Locke (brandon@educopia.org) to suggest its inclusion.

The intersections between DORA, open scholarship, and equity | DORA

Posted on by

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), published in May 2013, does not mention the term ‘open scholarship.’ And yet DORA and open scholarship are becoming increasingly entwined[1]. DORA’s ambition is to improve research evaluation practices but the practicalities of implementation make it impossible to separate the evaluation of research from questions about who and what research is for, who gets to be involved, and how it should best be carried out, all of which have to take account of the power dynamics that shape the scholarly landscape. Equally, progress towards open scholarship, which aims to make the products and processes of academic work as accessible to as many stakeholders as possible, requires changes in the ways that researchers and their research outputs and practices are assessed, incentivized and constructed. Here we examine the growing interactions between DORA and the open scholarship movement. By clarifying the alignment of the values and principles that underpin both endeavors, we see that they raise vital questions about equity and inclusion in research that must be central to reform within research organizations and the wider scholarly community.

Theme of 2019 International Open Access Week To Be “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge” – Open Access Week

Posted on by

The 2019 Open Access Week Advisory Committee is pleased to announce that the theme for the 2019 International Open Access Week, to be held October 21-27, will be “Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge”.

As the transition to a system for sharing knowledge that is open by default accelerates, the question “open for whom?” is essential—both to consider and to act upon. Whose interests are being prioritized in the actions we take and in the platforms that we support? Whose voices are excluded? Are underrepresented groups included as full partners from the beginning? Are we supporting not only open access but also equitable participation in research communication? These questions will determine the extent to which emerging open systems for research will address inequities in the current system or replicate and reinforce them.

This year’s theme will build on the groundwork laid last year when discussions focused on “Designing Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge.” The 2018 theme highlighted the importance of making a central commitment to equity as we transition toward new systems for sharing knowledge, and the past twelve months have only seen the pace of that transition increase. Because of this, the Open Access Week Advisory Committee decided it was important to focus on equity again in 2019—to deepen our conversations about being inclusive by design and to turn those conversations into action.

 

[…]