Info-Structure: Ssn 1: Episode 2
Info-Structure is a snapshot of current events and ideas in the wide open knowledge movement, and is designed to supplement the Association of Research Libraries’ Accelerating the Social Impact of Research (ASIR) program. Read more in depth analysis on the ASIR blog.
Goings-on
PLOS is concluding an event titled Scientists for Open Science, tangentially part of the new and rapidly expanding #openscienceweek. The program was organized by themes like Inclusion, Trust, and Community. Aside from the content, the delivery of the program, web modules with pre-recorded discussions and engagement opportunities, was novel and welcome in the age of virtual conferences.
The next few weeks are ripe for open science meetings, several of which will point toward the near horizon hopeful ratification of UNESCO’s open science recommendation in November. A few are listed below:
- MetaScience, Sep 16–18 and 23–25: a global virtual gathering to connect the study of science across disciplines, methodologies, and regions.
- OASPA — Designing 21st Century Knowledge Sharing Systems, Sep 21–23: to address many timely and fundamental topics relating to open scholarly communication and also offer a forum for collective reflection on the ongoing impact of the pandemic and our endeavours to ensure scholarship is open and accessible to all to address all current and future challenges.
- Open Science Fair, Sep 20–23: to bring together and empower open science communities and services; to identify common practices related to open science; to see what are the best synergies to deliver and operate services that work for many; and to bring experiences from all around the world and learn from each other.
Looking ahead, several meetings are just being announced that promise to ground these high-level initiatives in disciplines/fields.
- Putting Open Social Scholarship Into Practice, Dec. 8–9
- Unconference on Open Scholarship Practices in Education Research, Feb. 24–25, 2022
Insights
The Commonplace from MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group released a set of essays under the banner of The Business of Knowing: Bringing about [infra]structural change to knowledge communication. The editors write,
In this series we find a range of productive imaginings: from drawing on our history to thoughtfully map out our futures to reframing infrastructure as an activity; from cooperative-based organizational structures to cooperative sustainability; from restructuring citations to opening up grant proposals; from securing sustainability through collective funding, to subscribing to open, and/or reapportioning existing grants and budgets; from new authorship models to centering video and other media as valid scholarly outputs. All of these ideas are community-centered and, with respect to incorporating them into tools and policies, should be community-driven. It’ll take more than economic shifts, or technological innovations, or cultural changes. In fact, it’s no longer helpful to think of these separately. We need them all, and we need them together.
Against the Grain released an episode featuring Sarah Lippincott, a consultant and incisive mind in the library + publishing space. Sarah says, responding to a question about why some libraries are approaching publishing as a core activity at a time when academic publishing feels so volatile:
[It’s about] being a mission-driven and values driven publisher. Library publishers see the opportunity to serve their campuses in a values-driven way, to manifest their values of openness and transparency in scholarly publishing, in equity and inclusion… in accessibility, and diversifying the scholarly record, as well as asserting their role in more global knowledge supply chains and ecosystems.
Invest in Open Infrastructure shared the anticipated report from their Future of Open Scholarship project, titled Designing a Preparedness Model for Open Scholarship. The document reports on the study “to better understand key decision points, costs, and funding models to maintain, sustain, and scale open infrastructure projects.” One of the medium term recommendations to design collective service and support models (5.2.1), underlines the need to understand infrastructure as inclusive of people, time and money. The authors write:
Further work is needed to better understand where services, shared staffing, and coordinated support are best suited for collective benefit, and where opportunities exist for consortia, national funding programs, and vendors to allocate additional resources towards shared aims. This work aims to further increase attention and drive resourcing to shared infrastructure needs, heightening the resilience of shared systems by expanding and diversifying the pool of those investing in open infrastructure.
Together these and other recent pieces affirm a sense of urgency, no doubt following from our continued observation of incredible shifts in research production and dissemination due to the pandemic, and a belief that there is a building confluence in the shared imagination, values, and labor of open research.
Ideas
In Defining Social Impact, Micah Vandegrift summarizes three studies at the intersection of open research and hopes for societal change. He proposes a role that libraries might play in increasing the connectivity of academic knowledge to an interested public by offering a working concept:
Communicated Scholarship — the process for modulating, re-presenting, and then amplifying academic knowledge in non-academic modes.
Read more on the ASIR blog.
Questions, comments, ideas, or provocations can be sent to Micah Vandegrift — mlvandeg [at] ncsu.edu
