Hello & initial thoughts on ‘open’

Hi! This is my first post on Medium as part of my participation in the PG Cert HE ‘Open Knowledge’ module.

My name is Lucy May and I work in the Scholarly Communications team of the University of Manchester Library, where I support the University’s researchers in publishing their scholarly work Open Access. Although I am preoccupied with the openness of research publishing every day, I hadn’t really considered ‘openness’ as a concept in itself and in the wider world outside HE, until I began this module. It’s quite exciting to realise just how significant a topic this is in the digital world of today.

In our first #OKHE lecture, Prof. Martin Weller mentioned how openness has been co-opted by commercial companies, and talked about ‘openwashing’ with comparisons to the ‘Greenwashing’ employed by cynical corporations. I was interested in finding examples of openwashing, or ‘fauxpen’ as it is also known. I found a few blog posts including OpenSource.com and OpenKnowledgeBlog, but these were from 2014. I wondered if anyone has anyone come across any more recent examples of this?