Advantages & disadvantages of openness

When considering adopting open practice, one way to approach it is to consider the advantages and disadvantages it offers. Open practice brings a number of benefits, depending on the particular task at hand. These include:

• Altruism — it’s a good thing to do generally to share, and is at the heart of much of what academia is about.
• Efficiency –there is a more pragmatic stance beyond altruism in that sharing content, ideas, data, source code is simply a more efficient way to work.
• Increased profile — this can be important for research projects who want different stakeholders to know about their existence and to engage with them, individuals establishing an academic identity, and resources (eg open access articles) that you want to be widely accessed.
• Dissemination — this arises largely as a combination of the previous two (efficiency and profile), but much of higher education is concerned with dissemination, and conducting this in an open manner is the most effective route.
• Wider participation — whether it is contribution to a project, forming ideas or getting learners to engage with a broader audience, then open practice offers a means of getting engagement beyond the immediate participants.
• Unexpected outcomes — there are many stories of how open practice can lead to (pleasant) unpredicted outcomes, such as the use of content in different contexts, new connections, the formulation of project ideas, etc.
• Innovation — the open space is often one that allows room for experimentation and innovation outside of formal conventions.
• Easy collaboration — collaboration often requires a good deal of organisation, it requires memorandums of understanding, project plans, commitment. Whereas in the open space much of this collaboration ‘just happens’.

However, there is also a downside to open practice, and awareness of these issues is also significant. These can include:

Exposure to aggressive behaviour — whilst the majority of interaction in academic spaces is supportive, in an open dialogue, anyone can join, and depending on the topic this can involve aggressive behaviour, trolls, etc

• Always on — one of the benefits of open practice is that it blurs the boundary between professional and private spaces, which can mean you connect with people. But this also means there is a tendency to always be checking updates, and a loss of private space.
• Monitoring — the greater the proportion of our identity we give online, then the more data there is circulating about our behaviour (location, preferences, date of birth, etc).
• Identity issues — as an open, online identity becomes more significant, then so the pressure to establish one increases. Knowing how to do this effectively and safely are significant issues.
• Time pressure — operating in the open can lead to time saving, but there is also an initial investment in establishing a network and identity, and the time required to do this is often not recognised.
• Unpredictability — while open practice can lead to some interesting, unpredicted outcomes, this can be problematic, for instance if content suddenly becomes popular, comments are used in a different context, or intended dissemination and collaboration does not arise.

What this brief list of advantages and disadvantages highlight is that they are interrelated — each benefit comes with a potential downside. But the same is also true for existing practice. As James Boyle (2008) argues ‘It is not that openness is always right. It is not. … Rather, it is that we need a balance between open and closed, owned and free, and we are systematically likely to get the balance wrong.’ By considering these advantages and disadvantages (and you can probably think of more) it is possible to consider how open practice can best be utilized in your own context. However, open practice is often cast as the additional, or alternative way of working. Looking at the list of advantages, try reversing that perspective and consider openness as the default, and the argument for a closed version needs to be made instead. It is entirely possible that this is the best route in some situations, but not as our default assumption.

You might like to consider which advantage, and disadvantage, is most relevant to your context. Also, are there any advantages/disadvantages you can think of not listed here?