Open Scholarship

As part of a faculty learning community on “Open Scholarship” I will be posting a series of blog posts on the concept itself and potential uses/implications. This post is the first in the series.

One of the first “moves” that I teach my students about reading academic writing is to practice reading for different purposes. Two of these purposes are “reading with the grain” – granting the author the most charitable read possible in order to understand his/her claims vs. “reading against the grain” – questioning the categories, assumptions and implications of the claims made in order to position oneself as another voice in the conversation.

For the purposes of this post, I will do that latter. I do this, in part, because the concept of openness sounds a lot like mom or apple pie, in that the concept is exceedingly easy to cheer.

The first question that I would like to pose asks for clarification of the parties involved (i.e. open to whom?). One way of thinking about this question is to posit that there are many “publics” that we might imagine as potential audiences for open scholarship. This would include academic peers, stake-holders who are not in the academy, government, industry, etc. The potential use of research (whether it  be in the form of raw data, results, implications, etc.) is as varied as the number of publics that we can imagine.  Of course these various groups would have different types of expertise, training, and goals that both inform and shape their engagement with the scholarship in question. To consider the topic of openness without addressing the question “to whom” seems to potentially over-simplify the conversation to the point that it is not useful.

The second question that I would like to address concerns the financial part of openness, but is closely connected to my previous concern. The best way to explain is through an analogy. The vast majority of people would consider the donation of blood an unambiguous good, myself included. The system that we have in the U.S., by and large is that volunteers choose to freely give their blood to organizations like the Red Cross for no other remuneration than a light snack and a lapel sticker. However, when that blood becomes a part of the health system, it often becomes an instrument of exchange with real value. Perhaps no one is ever charged for the blood itself, but the person who receives the blood (or the government/corporate interest insuring that person) will surely be charged for the medical personnel, facilities, and equipment that are instrumental to its use. We can all agree that the giving of the blood is a good thing and that we would hate to see a system where the donation of blood is connected to an economic exchange. However, it is naive to imagine that an economic exchange is not already happening, though the donor is not part of the transaction.

So by analogy, I would ask if participating in open scholarship (though a good in itself) is not also providing an opportunity for other, unknown publics to commodify and gain through the altruism of the academic community? If this is the case, is it a problem?

For more on the Muhlenberg Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship visit https://open.flc.bergbuilds.domains/about/ or follow #OpenBerg on twitter.