Open production and expertise
As a part of the Faculty Learning Community on Open Scholarship, participants are required to submit short responses for each session (for details see here). The goal behind these responses is to encourage open communication by to sharing issues important to individual members of the group. This opens up avenues of discussion others may not have considered. How is openness understood and enacted differently in the humanities? In the social sciences? In pedagogy? In the library? How do those differences translate back into fields that are often seen as distinct? What commonalities span across fields?
I’ll share an example. Last week in our conversation, a participant shared that he could not quite wrap his head around how production in his work could be open, as argued by Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward (2017). Smith and Seward argue that openness is praxis, that is the process by which theory of openness is enacted, not the artifacts (e.g., open data or an open access journal). Within that process there are three components; production, distribution and consumption. The participant’s concern raised the issue that some fields, or even certain tasks within every field, may be more amenable to openness in parts of the process, not the entire thing. For example, publishing a summary of recent research on a particular topic is less amenable to open production because such an artifact needs the expertise of researchers who have developed extensive knowledge and experience within that field.
In truly open peer production, anyone can contribute and contributions are generally equivalent. While this may be true, often a limited number of experts guide the process, even if only through contributing a large percentage of the product (e.g., open source software or FOSS). Producing a journal article through truly open peer production would be difficult because of the range of expertise. Crowdsourcing is more hierarchical version of open production where a small number of participants guide and control activities while others are often data collectors. The best example of this is “citizen science,” where non-experts collect data that experts have determined to be relevant (the annual Great Backyard Bird Count is a great example of this). Can a journal article be produced this way? I’m having a hard time seeing how.
This fundamentally gets to the issue of expertise. Expertise is central to scholarship, particularly in terms of production. Clearly expertise is not limited to scholarship. Boat builders, film directors, teachers are experts. How is expertise defined? Who possesses expertise? And who gets to enact that expertise. Well, I’m certainly not going to answer that in one simple blog post, but I will offer up an interesting example of open production in a journal article.
In my Historical Ecology class, we recently read “Anthropological Contributions to Historical Ecology: 50 Questions, Infinite Prospects” by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong and 21 others (2017). The goal of the article is to outline the fifty questions central to the multi- and inter-disciplinary field of historical ecology. A closed model would rely upon a small number of experts- perhaps only one- to essentially write an extensive literature review that largely look backwards to discover what the central questions of the field were and to attempt to look forward as well. The model used by Armstrong et al. is an open production model. Initially 28 attendees at a historical ecology meeting proposed a set of c. 300 questions. An online survey to scholars working in historical ecology yielded additional questions. Questions were then sorted into 6 categories. At a following meeting, 47 participants broke up into six groups and, through a complex consensus building process reworked, collapsed and edited the questions down to 82. A subset of this group pared the questions down to 62, which were offered up to the online community who, through ranking, reduced the number to 50. Clearly not all scholarship can be produced in this manner, but I would argue that this process resulted in a fairly representative and, perhaps most importantly, forward-looking list of questions that are of concern to the field. The authors note that this process did result in questions that lean towards English language speakers (71% of participants were Canadian, Swedish, American, or from the UK) and there was under representation from South America, Germany, France, Russia, and Japan.
Armstrong, Chelsey Geralda, Anna C. Shoemaker, Iain McKechnie, Anneli Ekblom, Péter Szabó, Paul J. Lane, Alex C. McAlvay, et al. 2017. “Anthropological Contributions to Historical Ecology: 50 Questions, Infinite Prospects.” PLOS ONE 12 (2): e0171883. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0171883.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171883
Smith, Matthew Longshore, and Ruhiya Seward. 2017. “Openness as Social Praxis.” First Monday 22 (4). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7073.
