Open scholarship
“It is one of the noblest duties of a university to advance
knowledge and to diffuse it, not merely among those
who can attend the daily lectures, but far and wide."
Daniel Coit Gilman, First President, Johns Hopkins University
The traditional values of the academy have been centred around enabling and encouraging intellectual endeavour, valuing scholarship for its own worth and fostering a collaborative spirit in the furtherance of society, all founded in a collegiate view of the academic community worldwide.
Within the traditional mission of universities was, as Daniel Coit Gilman so simply encapsulated in his words above, a commitment to create knowledge and share it as widely as possible for the benefit of all. This commitment was enacted in two main ways. Through public lectures and similar educational outreach activities, universities aspired to promulgate the knowledge created within academia to the general population, raising the level of public understanding of the sciences and arts and increasing the cherishing and appreciation of knowledge in wider society. And, through long-established channels of intra-academy communication – learned journals, books, papers and pamphlets – universities aspired to encourage the widespread dissemination, from each scholar to as many others as possible, of the findings from research on which the next tranche of research effort would be built.
Over the last few decades this commitment, which was, anyway, a laudable but problematic goal in the age of print-on-paper, has largely been lost. What was once a system of open and shared scholarly communication, owned and managed by the academy and associated scholarly societies, has transformed into a ‘Closed Access’ model where ownership resides largely outside the academy in the hands of commercial companies and with the scholarly research record quarantined behind access-barriers that only those who have the money to pay for subscriptions, licences or purchases can traverse.
Providing access to all the research findings that faculty require is beyond the means of even the world’s richest universities. It is unsurprising, then, that the situation in the world’s poorer regions is dire. At the turn of the millennium, more than half the research-based institutions in lower-income countries had had no current subscriptions to international medical research journals for five years (1). The price of this relinquishing of the ideal of the knowledge commons to commercial interests has been a compromise in the efficacy of research and a suboptimal return to the society that funds it. The public good has been diminished.
The development of the World Wide Web has, however, imposed a new set of conditions. And, just as in the evolution of the natural world, new conditions spawn new developments. Opportunities abound for all aspects of scholarly endeavour and the changes that are taking root in both pedagogy and research are profound. Grid computing is transforming the way science is carried out in many fields; high-speed information transfer across the Web enables distance learning to take place far more effectively than ever before; sophisticated IT systems in universities provide the means for linking individuals and groups that were once separated across disciplinary boundaries – and across the campus – in ways that engender collaborative, productive work; and new computer technologies scour and plunder web-wide data to put together erstwhile disparate facts into new knowledge.
In particular respect of scholarly communication, the Closed Access model is being replaced by Open Access, freeing the scholarly journal literature from cost barriers and opening up the research literature to scholars everywhere, however wealthy or poor their institution may be.
Associated developments in scholarly communication centre around other, new, informal means of dissemination and communication (so-called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies), changes in peer review systems, the blurring of boundaries between articles and datasets, and the increasing recognition of new and different forms of output as legitimate products of the research effort.
These developments call for new thinking on the part of research-based institutions – about what can be legitimised and what perhaps cannot, about the mechanisms for recognising, recording and assessing scholarly activity, and about the new reward systems that will be needed.
At the same time, universities and research institutions need to take back control of the scholarly communication system, so long out of their hands, and drive a return to the knowledge commons. The base values of this remain as they traditionally were – collaboration, cooperation, sharing and delivering maximum societal benefit from societal investment.
There are many signs that the tide is changing. The University of Edinburgh’s strategic plan for 2008-12 contains the following statement:
“The mission of our University is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge.” In one short sentence, Edinburgh’s senior management has committed itself to those traditional values of the academy and has promised to do its bit to improve the efficacy of scholarly endeavour. Dozens of universities and research funders are now implementing Open Access policies to cover the research that is carried out in their institutions. Tens of thousands of individual researchers are making their work freely available to all. The Web is shifting civilisation into the next age – after the development of language, writing and printing comes the new means of helping to quench the human thirst for knowledge.
EurOpenScholar has been convened to provide the forum for universities and research institutions to discuss and develop actions that continue to improve scholarly communication in the age of the Web. Our members share the core academic values of knowledge dissemination and maximising the public good. Our aim is to discuss and guide developments in scholarly exchange along paths that guarantee optimal benefit to the academy and society. We invite interested senior managers in all universities and research institutes worldwide to join us in helping to shape the future.
Within the traditional mission of universities was, as Daniel Coit Gilman so simply encapsulated in his words above, a commitment to create knowledge and share it as widely as possible for the benefit of all. This commitment was enacted in two main ways. Through public lectures and similar educational outreach activities, universities aspired to promulgate the knowledge created within academia to the general population, raising the level of public understanding of the sciences and arts and increasing the cherishing and appreciation of knowledge in wider society. And, through long-established channels of intra-academy communication – learned journals, books, papers and pamphlets – universities aspired to encourage the widespread dissemination, from each scholar to as many others as possible, of the findings from research on which the next tranche of research effort would be built.
Over the last few decades this commitment, which was, anyway, a laudable but problematic goal in the age of print-on-paper, has largely been lost. What was once a system of open and shared scholarly communication, owned and managed by the academy and associated scholarly societies, has transformed into a ‘Closed Access’ model where ownership resides largely outside the academy in the hands of commercial companies and with the scholarly research record quarantined behind access-barriers that only those who have the money to pay for subscriptions, licences or purchases can traverse.
Providing access to all the research findings that faculty require is beyond the means of even the world’s richest universities. It is unsurprising, then, that the situation in the world’s poorer regions is dire. At the turn of the millennium, more than half the research-based institutions in lower-income countries had had no current subscriptions to international medical research journals for five years (1). The price of this relinquishing of the ideal of the knowledge commons to commercial interests has been a compromise in the efficacy of research and a suboptimal return to the society that funds it. The public good has been diminished.
The development of the World Wide Web has, however, imposed a new set of conditions. And, just as in the evolution of the natural world, new conditions spawn new developments. Opportunities abound for all aspects of scholarly endeavour and the changes that are taking root in both pedagogy and research are profound. Grid computing is transforming the way science is carried out in many fields; high-speed information transfer across the Web enables distance learning to take place far more effectively than ever before; sophisticated IT systems in universities provide the means for linking individuals and groups that were once separated across disciplinary boundaries – and across the campus – in ways that engender collaborative, productive work; and new computer technologies scour and plunder web-wide data to put together erstwhile disparate facts into new knowledge.
In particular respect of scholarly communication, the Closed Access model is being replaced by Open Access, freeing the scholarly journal literature from cost barriers and opening up the research literature to scholars everywhere, however wealthy or poor their institution may be.
Associated developments in scholarly communication centre around other, new, informal means of dissemination and communication (so-called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies), changes in peer review systems, the blurring of boundaries between articles and datasets, and the increasing recognition of new and different forms of output as legitimate products of the research effort.
These developments call for new thinking on the part of research-based institutions – about what can be legitimised and what perhaps cannot, about the mechanisms for recognising, recording and assessing scholarly activity, and about the new reward systems that will be needed.
At the same time, universities and research institutions need to take back control of the scholarly communication system, so long out of their hands, and drive a return to the knowledge commons. The base values of this remain as they traditionally were – collaboration, cooperation, sharing and delivering maximum societal benefit from societal investment.
There are many signs that the tide is changing. The University of Edinburgh’s strategic plan for 2008-12 contains the following statement:
“The mission of our University is the creation, dissemination and curation of knowledge.” In one short sentence, Edinburgh’s senior management has committed itself to those traditional values of the academy and has promised to do its bit to improve the efficacy of scholarly endeavour. Dozens of universities and research funders are now implementing Open Access policies to cover the research that is carried out in their institutions. Tens of thousands of individual researchers are making their work freely available to all. The Web is shifting civilisation into the next age – after the development of language, writing and printing comes the new means of helping to quench the human thirst for knowledge.
EurOpenScholar has been convened to provide the forum for universities and research institutions to discuss and develop actions that continue to improve scholarly communication in the age of the Web. Our members share the core academic values of knowledge dissemination and maximising the public good. Our aim is to discuss and guide developments in scholarly exchange along paths that guarantee optimal benefit to the academy and society. We invite interested senior managers in all universities and research institutes worldwide to join us in helping to shape the future.
Further resources
Swan, A (2006) Overview of scholarly communication. In: Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Chandos, Oxford.
Swan, A. (2008) The 'Big Picture' and researchers' top concerns about the scholarly communications process: a report to the JISC Scholarly Communications Group.
Swan, A. (2008) The 'Big Picture' and researchers' top concerns about the scholarly communications process: a report to the JISC Scholarly Communications Group.
References
(1) Aronson, B (2004) Improving Online Access to Medical Information for Low-income Countries. New England J. Medicine 350, pp. 966–968.
