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Open Scholarship Policy Observatory (Volume 1)/Introduction

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Caroline Winter, with Alyssa Arbuckle, Tanja Niemann, Lynne Siemens, and Ray Siemens

As momentum behind the Open Scholarship movement has increased over the past several years, policy has emerged as a key issue. In particular, questions about open scholarship policy include: How and to what extent does policy advance open scholarship? What effect does policy have on individuals and their work? How does policy affect open scholarly practices?

This volume reflects the first years, 2017-2020, of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, a hub for information and resources related to all aspects of open scholarship that includes a collection of policy documents as well as policy analysis. From its inception in 2017, The Open Scholarship Policy Observatory has been coordinated by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI), based in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, as an initiative of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership’s Policy Cluster, 2020-present, co-facilitated by Tanja Niemann and Lynne Siemens. It follows and reflects policy developments related to open scholarship in Canada and beyond, analyzing policy changes and their relevance to researchers, information professionals, librarians, faculty, and policymakers. The Observatory was created in recognition of the development of numerous and increasing numbers of open access policies and mandates, as well as confusion about the various routes to open access and which approach works best (Milligan et al. 2019).

The OSPO tracks changes in national and international policy and reflects those findings back to the community, with the aim of building understanding of and community around open scholarship policy in Canada and beyond. For instance, more and more national governments, funding organizations, and institutions are developing policies related to open access to research data and publications, which intersect and sometimes conflict in complicated ways. Other forms and types of policies that make up the wider research ecosystem also affect open scholarship policy, such as publishers’ policies about rights retention, international digital infrastructure standards, and institutions’ review, tenure, and promotion guidelines. Given the role policy plays in influencing how researchers work and whether and how they share that work, an understanding of the policy landscape—both its foundations and its emerging trends—is key to advancing open scholarship.

The OSPO is aligned with work in the Open Scholarship Press publications on Policy. One is the Collection (Winter et al, 2023; https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections:_Policy), which surveys current literature about open scholarship policy, offering a snapshot of the field of policy analysis and criticism. It does so with the goal of mapping the contours of this field and identifying the major critical pathways, recognizing that, as a snapshot, it cannot capture the entirety of the field in detail. The other is the Curated Volume (Winter et al, 2024; https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Curated_Volumes:_Policy) which draws together a selection of key resources for further engagement. Most are foundational policies and principles, but examples of theoretical overviews, research studies, and critical analysis are also included to provide a broad snapshot of the open scholarship policy landscape. Both volumes are accompanied by analytical overviews, reflective of the area and is important directions.

Open Scholarship, and its Focal Points

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Open scholarship is an umbrella term that refers both to open scholarly practices, such as open peer review, and their outcomes, such as open access publications. Although open scholarship is sometimes referred to as “open science,” it is not discipline specific, comprising all disciplines and a variety of interrelated practices and principles. What began more than 20 years ago as small-scale and local has evolved into a global movement, but one that advances unevenly and, in many ways, uneasily (Tennant et al. 2019a).

Because open scholarship encompasses so many things, it is difficult to define. George Veletsianos (2016) describes it as “the wide and broad dissemination of scholarship by a variety of interconnected means (e.g., technology, licensing) aiming to broaden knowledge and reduce barriers to access to knowledge and information” (16; see also Veletsianos and Kimmons 2012). In “Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development,” Jonathan Tennant et al. (2019a) define it as “the process, communication, and re-use of research as practised in any scholarly research discipline, and its inclusion and role within wider society” (sec. 3). This definition reflects the complexity of the phenomenon itself: as Tennant et al. (2019a) point out, there is no one definition, framework, policy, or declaration that captures the movement as a whole: it is a complex of people, organizations, ideas, values, practices, and outcomes. They usefully describe open scholarship as a “boundary object,” which Samuel Moore (2017) defines as “a concept that has a specific understanding in a local community of practice but is rigid enough to maintain its definition across communities too” (para. 5). Understanding it as a boundary object allows for flexible definitions and conceptions of what constitutes open scholarship while maintaining enough of a common understanding to make the term meaningful.

As outlined in “Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development” (see Winter's OSP volumes), a foundational policy strategy document drafted by an international team of open scholarship practitioners and stakeholders, scholarship is founded upon the ideal of “advancing our collective knowledge to the benefit of all humankind,” but this ideal is under tension from the complex and often competing values and structures within which scholarship is performed, such as competition for jobs and publication opportunities (Tennant et al. 2019a, sec. 1). Open scholarship seeks to “realign modern research practices with this ideal” so that openness becomes the norm (sec. 1). Although the movement is diverse, its proponents share the belief that “increased adoption of Open Scholarship practices (and more generally, simply open practices) is generally a good thing” (sec. 4).

Open scholarship can be understood as comprising two main categories, which we might also think about as axes: “knowledge and practices and principles and values” (Tennant et al. 2019a, sec. 4.1.3). Along the “knowledge and practices” axis sit the components of open scholarship, such as open access and open data; along the “principles and values” axis are ideas such as “participation, equality, transparency, cognitive justice, collaboration, sharing, equity, and inclusivity.” In addition to categorical structure, Tennant et al. (2019) draw on five schools of thought that Benedikt Fecher and Sascha Friesike (2013) proposed as a way of understanding open science:

the infrastructure school (which is concerned with the technological architecture), the public school (which is concerned with the accessibility of knowledge creation), the measurement school (which is concerned with alternative impact measurement), the democratic school (which is concerned with access to knowledge) and the pragmatic school (which is concerned with collaborative research). (Abstract)

As might be expected of such a complex movement, there are tensions within it, many having to do with geographical and disciplinary differences as well as the varying needs and priorities of its stakeholder groups, which include researchers and institutions as well as funding bodies, publishers and other industry groups, and policymakers (Tennant et al. 2019a). Some of the strongest tensions are related to licenses and licensing practices, the various models of and routes to open access, the responsibility for and control of infrastructure, and the “role of policy mandates in driving openness” (sec. 4.2.3). That said, Tennant et al. (2019a) identify policy as one of the movement’s strengths, noting that “it remains important that the imperative and agenda for Open Scholarship remains recognised at the highest political levels” (sec. 6). However, problems arise when top-down policies, such as those dictated by international and national funding bodies, are not accompanied by resources (e.g., appropriate infrastructure) to ensure their successful implementation. Bottom-up policies, such as those developed by institutional libraries or even individuals, tend to be opt-in and not enforced or enforceable (Tennant et al. 2019a).

Open scholarship is facilitated and made possible by digital technologies, but openness is not inherently digital, and those digital technologies are not necessarily open. Noting that digital technologies have enabled scholarly journals to have a broader reach through open access, for instance, John Maxwell (2015) argues that scholarly communication as a whole needs to move away from models based on the paradigm of print production and embrace a “Web-based publishing model” (4). Moving toward this “network paradigm” (4) allows us to reconsider not only the forms of scholarly publication—reimagining, for instance, what an article or a monograph look like—but also what it means to publish. The print paradigm is founded on the idea of making something public by printing it; now that the challenge is no longer how to make works public but how to make them relevant and findable, publication under a network paradigm refers to “not the production of books but the production of a public for whom those books have meaning” (Stadler 2010).[1] In order to create this public, scholarship—scholarly practices and their outcomes—must be social (Maxwell 2015).

The term policy is already broad, and it is applied here broadly as well to encompass not only formal international, national, and institutional policy statements but also formal and informal policies about the issues and topics that constitute open scholarship (e.g., open access, open data) and adjacent issues (e.g., copyright; review, tenure, and promotion). Policy alone is not enough to effect change, however: as MacCallum et al. (2020) note, “OA policy is a tool that must be partnered with additional resources in order to increase impact,” such as training of librarians and scholarly communications practitioners (9). Moreover, a cultural shift is necessary in order for open scholarship to become the default scholarly mode; this will involve dispelling persistent myths about the nature of open access and open scholarship, such as the myth that open access journals are not peer-reviewed and are largely predatory. It will also involve shifting how we value scholarship from a model of exclusivity, in which publishing in the most exclusive, subscription-based journals confers the most scholarly value, to one of open inclusivity, what Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2019) calls “generous thinking” (see also MacCallum et al. 2020). In outlining the scope of the field, the authors of this scan recognize that policy plays a role in many areas of the scholarly ecosystem and is not always named or understood as policy.

Emergent Themes, Scope

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While policy is part of a complex of interrelated fields, disciplines, and stakeholder groups, the focus of our work is on the role of policy in the scholarly communication ecosystem.

One significant theme in this work is the vital role played by libraries, librarians, scholarly communications practitioners, and the field of library and information science (LIS) more generally in the open scholarship movement. As noted in Advancing Open: Views from Scholarly Communications Practitioners (MacCallum 2020), a report by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL-ABRC), openness is a fundamental value of library and information science, and information professionals have been and continue to be instrumental in advancing open access and open scholarship, both by supporting it locally, such as through institutional repositories, and by supporting large-scale infrastructure initiatives. The advocacy work performed by librarians and information professionals, such as negotiations with publishers, has also driven open scholarship forward.

Another important theme is that, although the scholarly communications ecosystem is global in scale, it is heterogeneous, with significant variations among local environments. This means, among other things, that solutions that work well in one context do not necessarily work in another. MacCallum et al. (2020), for instance, note that although Canada is aligned in principle with Plan S, a European open access initiative, its engagement with open scholarship is newer, and it has not yet developed the infrastructure—financial, technical, or cultural—necessary for implementing such a sweeping transformation.

A third, related theme that emerges is that there are significant tensions within the movement. These include, for example, whether a top-down or bottom-up approach to open scholarship is best, whether revolutionary or evolutionary change has the greatest chance of success, and what role commercial publishing should play in the transformed ecosystem, if any.

A final theme that emerges is that open scholarship is inherently social and collaborative. MacCallum et al. (2020) point out, for example, that the only way to successfully advance open scholarship in Canada is to work collaboratively and transparently with all stakeholders, including researchers, scholarly communications practitioners, information professionals, and national organizations such as funding bodies and scholarly associations. 

These themes emerge in the OSPO’s observations across the period 2017-2020, and into those carried on to this day – elaborated on more fully in Winter et al’s 2023 collection surveying current literature about open scholarship policy, across its sections considering Foundational Policies and Policy Frameworks, Open Scholarship and the Open Scholarship Movement (through Open Access, Open Data, Open Education, Open Knowledge, and Open Source), Scholarly Communication (its Landscape, Libraries and Open Scholarly Communication, Publication Models and Subscription Practices, and Open Monographs), Infrastructure (including Digital Research Infrastructure, Funding Models and Infrastructures, Bibliometrics, Intellectual Property and Copyright, Identity Management, Linked Open Data, and Research Data Management), Collaboration and Community Engagement (via Knowledge Mobilization and Translation, Community Engagement, Public Scholarship, and Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science) and, lastly, Policy Development, Implementation, and Analysis (across Open Scholarship Practices, Institutional Policy and its Implementation, National and International Policy and its Implementation, and Social Justice). In addition to OSPO observations being the foundation for this analytical work, it serves and the grounding for the curated volume (Winter et al 2024) reflecting essential reading in these areas, and its detailed analytical overview (Winter 2024; https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections:_Policy/Introduction).

Observations presented in this volume are authored by Sarah Milligan, Kim Silk, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Caroline Winter. Tanja Niemann and Lynne Siemens have provided policy area expertise and leadership, with Alyssa Arbuckle and Ray Siemens serving as overseeing editors, as well as initiating research design from across those in the INKE partnership. Reviewers of work published here include Janneke Adema, Clare Appavoo, Jonathan Bengtson, Lisa Goddard, Gary Hall, Janet Halliwell, Rachel Hendery, Matt Huculak, Inba Kehoe, Les Kneebone, John Maxwell, Kate Shuttleworth, and Claire Warwick, among others. Tim Sobie has led the technical development and production. French translation of this introduction and these OSPO observations, led by Olga Ziminova, will soon be available.

Works Cited

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  • Fecher, Benedikt, and Sascha Friesike. 2013. “Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought.” In Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing, edited by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike, 17–47. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_2
  • Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Milligan, Sarah, Kimberly Silk, Alyssa Arbuckle, and Ray Siemens. 2019. “The Initial Impact of the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 3 (February): 16. https://doi.org/10.5334/kula.43
  • Moore, Samuel A. 2017. “A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research.” Revue Française Des Sciences de l’information et de La Communication 11 (1). https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.3220
  • Stadler, Matthew. 2010. What is publication? Keynote presentation at Richard Hugo House writer’s conference Finding Your Audience in the 21st Century. Seattle, WA. Quoted in Maxwell 2015, 5.
  • Tennant, Jonathan, Jennifer Elizabeth Beamer, Jeroen Bosman, Björn Brembs, Neo Christopher Chung, Gail Clement, Tom Crick, et al. 2019a. “Foundations for Open Scholarship Strategy Development.” Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/b4v8p
  • 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
  • Winter, Caroline, Alyssa Arbuckle, Jesse Thomas Kern, Vitor Yano, Anna Honcharova, Tyler Fontenot, Graham Jensen, Alan Colín-Arce, Ray Siemens, Tanja Niemann, Lynne Simens, and the INKE and ETCL Research Groups, editors. 2023. Open Scholarship Press Collections: Policy, Open Scholarship Press. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections:_Policy
  • Winter, Caroline, Alyssa Arbuckle, Jesse Thomas Kern, Vitor Yano, Anna Honcharova, Tyler Fontenot, Graham Jensen, Alan Colín-Arce, Ray Siemens, Tanja Niemann, Lynne Simens, and the INKE and ETCL Research Groups, editors. 2024. Open Scholarship Press Curated Volumes: Policy, Open Scholarship Press. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections:_Policy
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