Scholarly Communications must be Open

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In this second post in my series discussing how scholarly communications must transform in the digital age, I address the topic of openness -- a concept that includes but goes broader than Open Access publishing. 

Openness is a dominant value of online culture, but not of academic culture, sadly. One would think openness to be consistent with the ideals of a liberal education or academic freedom, but those ideals are endorsed only insofar as content is concerned: one can study or research anything; one may not, however, depart from institutionalized formats, venues, or procedures for making or sharing knowledge (that is, if one wishes to receive academic credit for one's efforts).

The sort of openness upon which online culture thrives is at odds with the way academia has structured the authentication and dissemination of information. Yet scholars are relying upon the digital environment heavily (as everyone now does who has any access to it), sensing new opportunities for knowledge just as others see new opportunities online for business or politics.

Academia wants to have the Internet, but not let it change its exclusive knowledge management practices. It wants to exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model. But you can't have it both ways. You can't participate in a medium fundamentally built around the concept of openness if you insist on a closed model of expertise and knowledge control. You can try (and academia is trying), but knowledge will simply route around the bad nodes. It comes down to this: the more academia wishes to enjoy the benefits of the digital medium, the less it can hold on to restrictive and closed practices in the production, vetting, dissemination, and archiving of information.

So, within an updated scholarly communications system, just what would "open" scholarship be? It turns out there are several kinds of openness, beginning with Open Access publishing.

Open Access. Open Access publishing is an alternative to traditional toll-access and copyright-restricted academic publishing. It offers a way for learned communication to broaden its impact exponentially, freeing scholarship from the barriers of cost and copyright that have sharply limited the access and use of scholarship. Every research institution should mandate Open Access as Harvard and other academic frontrunners have done. Open Access is a frequent topic on this blog. Despite its fundamental importance to the new intellectual landscape, Open Access publishing is a starting point, not the ending point, for open scholarly communications.

Open Review. Open scholarly communications will require Open Review of intellectual work. Open Access publishing does not insist upon this, being more focused on removing the major impediments that have hobbled traditional academic publications (toll access restrictions and intellectual property barriers). But Open Review is the logical companion to Open Access. (See, for example, Peter Suber's connection between Open Access and Open Review and Nikolaus Kriegeskorte's post on "Open post-publication peer reivew"). Open Review has implementation challenges, to be sure, but it is the only viable quality control method given the escalating scope of online information (a point I address more fully in my later post discussing scalability). And as with Open Access publishing, Open Review is a principle that can inform a range of changes possible in implementing greater transparency within the scholarly evaluation process.

As a radical alternative to traditional peer review, Open Review presents a point of resistance for traditional scholarship. For the moment, single-instance, pre-publication blind review by a limited number of peers is still held up as the superior mode of evaluation. Despite the historical momentum of this sort of peer review, it is intellectually less robust than Open Review, since an open system encourages multiple and ongoing reviews by interested parties within and outside the ivory tower, and it is not trammeled by the impeding delays of traditional editorial review. Traditional peer review is unsuited to the ideology of openness driving innovation, commerce, and the general information economy of the online world. It is sustained by institutional legacy, not by intellectual adequacy.

Open Dialogue.  Young scholars are taught to publish in order to join the academic "conversation." I put this in quotes because traditional scholarly publishing is only a conversation in a metaphorical way. If you spoke something to a friend, then waited a month (let a lone much longer periods) for a reply, then took just as long yourself to answer back -- it would not be an actual conversation, would it? Not that these long-term printed "conversations" of scholarship have not had significance, but it must be admitted that the print paradigm idea of the scholarly "conversation" lacks the dynamic of interactive response that genuine dialogue involves.

Scholarship will not be "open" in the way that the majority of online communication is today if it appears as a series of alternating and largely disconnected monologues -- especially when modern methods of interacting make possible global exchanges that are near-synchronous (if not real-time). Learned communication now has an opportunity to create and sustain genuine, back-and-forth dialogue.

Open scholarship must be interactive scholarship, accommodating and encouraging dialogue -- perhaps eventually through real-time communications, but certainly beginning with commenting systems or microblogging. Openness is tied to the participatory and interactive nature of the web, and Open Access publishing, as essential as it truly is, does not contemplate interactivity as a vital criterion for scholarship.

Traditional scholarly publishing pays homage to the "dialogue" of ideas in that metaphorical sense, but in reality it soundly rejects interactivity. Scholars are rewarded only for ongoing publications, not for discussing their existing publications, especially with those who are not their peers. The informal communication that comes through online discussion, however, is not inconsequential. Such discussion is a default mode of Web 2.0 communications.

Our new medium is conditioning us to believe that anyone can comment on anything, but that sort of openness is anathema to traditional scholarly communications. Scholars are supremely confident that only their intellectual peers can provide meaningful feedback (and chiefly prior to publication); they see no practical advantage to discussing their publications once published. For them, to be published is the test of knowledge; for the web audience of today, to be discussed is more important. The former is a closed knowledge model (the discussion is closed at the point of publication); the latter is an open model for knowledge (the discussion is opened with publication).

An online academic journal that does not accommodate input and feedback from readers through a commenting system is not conducting open scholarship. It may showcase a highly valued variety from the print paradigm, its articles might even all be published as Open Access -- but being closed to commenting or user-generated content is opting out of openness, at least as openness is now broadly understood and expected in online communications.

I am not saying that reader comments on scholarly articles constitute a substitute for traditional peer review. I am saying that dialogue is an expectation of online communications that cannot nor should not be dismissed. Since it is readily available through software platforms (such as the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems), those choosing not to dialogue with the public will be seen as rejecting the interactive and participatory values of the web. Academic institutions need to recognize this not only as a knowledge failing, but as a public relations blunder. They should pay attention to the corporate world and see what happens when publics are invited (or uninvited) from commenting on a company's products. Those companies that do not accommodate the dialogue do not go undiscussed; they are simply discussed less favorably.

Obviously there is a connection between restricted access scholarly publishing and a lack of dialogue about that scholarship. There is less likelihood of public or ongoing review of academic knowledge (with all its attendant annoyances or advantages) provided learned communication goes on secretly, just among privileged experts. The prospect of open dialogue makes traditional scholarly publishing look downright cabbalistic.

Open Process. Open scholarly communications requires scholars to be open about what they are working on (as I've posted about recently). Such scholars do not limit their intellectual contributions to the finished products of their research; they narrate their work and "publish" this informally and regularly so that others can draw value from seeing the process of their thinking and research. This is tied to the social nature of our online world and the ability scholars have (but have not generally exercised) to create and contribute to online communities. Open scholars do not restrict their online sociality to academic peers. This is yet another sticking point with traditional scholarly communications. Academia has professionalized by creating multiple, largely discrete specialty communities. All of the new communications technologies move contrary to such closed knowledge communities.

One of the most exciting aspects of open process scholarship is that it can leverage value from the routine intellectual activities of scholars that never make it to the curriculum vitae but which are vital to their research and thought (bibliography creation, data curation, statistical modeling, development of research protocols, pedagogical activities -- see my earlier post on Burning Redwoods). This requires some retooling in academia in order to capture, mark up, and internally value more kinds of scholarly activities.

Open process is continuous with open review and dialogue in promoting an interactive relationship between a scholar and his or her many audiences. This can lead to the rapid identification of errors and the general opportunity for scholars to revise and update. If scholars avail themselves of that opportunity, remaining dynamically responsive to the multiple communities that access and engage their work, their intellectual work will be a living thing, and they will be seen as open -- open to development, change, revision, and response. Some have called traditional scholarship "fossil knowledge" because it leaves the static remnants of a concluded process. In contrast, the open scholar's work will be seen as a living thing -- positively subject to change in an ongoing process of enhancement and evolution within a constructive feedback loop. Any intellectual work that is not responsive to change will be seen as closed, not open.

But this requires seeing scholarship more as process than as product, and it requires publishing to be more frequent and less formal than it has been. These are strong contrasts to traditional scholarly communications, which has no interactivity expectation and tolerates years (even decades) between revisions. No information system of the digital age works that way. Knowledge that takes years (or even months) to revise will not be relied on as trustworthy. Openness definitely has a temporal component to it, and publications that do not keep up with the pace of other information streams online will simply be eclipsed by those sources. This is not to say that time-intensive studies are impossible. Even a 40-year diachronic study is possible in the digital age; it just won't be considered serious if those conducting it do not engage their publics and report regularly (more often than yearly, certainly) on progress.

Open Formats. To accommodate the frequent interaction that will characterize open scholarship, the new scholarly communications system must employ appropriate online formats that can accommodate rapid and transparent versioning and that welcome the input and collaboration of many interested parties: wikis, blogs, commenting systems, etc. These cannot be proprietary or idiosyncratic; they need to be consistent with (and perhaps interfacing with) predominant social commenting systems.

The use of such open formats goes against traditional academic publishing, whose formats tend to be closed-ended and highly unresponsive to feedback. It is easier, of course, to be done with something once it is published, but that is an outdated knowledge model.

Open formats also suggests new formats, not merely tacking on Web 2.0 enhancements to traditional scholarly genres like the standard journal article or scientific report. Scholars and their institutions must be open to experimenting with new ways of representing and communicating information. Open scholarship will be open to exploring born-digital genres. Obviously wikis and other hyperlinked, editible formats fall in this category, but so do other knowledge genres such as simulations, visualizations, virtualizations, and other software-enabled, database-driven, socially-oriented, and media-rich genres.

Open formats means more than using things like wikis; it means our scholarly communications system must embrace the beta state of the online world and see it as part of the academic mission to develop and experiment with evolving formats or modes of representing and sharing information. The scholarly communications system must value and participate in ongoing active experimentation with the means of communicating knowledge. This has been advocated by those calling for the building of a research cyberinfrastructure and includes finding ways to recognize the scholars who work to create, assess, and enhance our evolving tools.

As an example of such openness to new forms of communication, it may seem heretical to consider the ephemeral and casual nature of microblogging to be a scholarly format. However, academics already using Twitter can attest that this communication tool is vital to more richly experiencing academic conferences, networking with scholars, or researching information that is critical to their mainstream scholarly work. Any scholarly communications system that does not acknowledge mission-critical information systems -- however novel or alloyed with less scholarly, populist kinds of communication -- is not correctly oriented to the predominant intellectual and cultural medium of our day.

Open Data. An open scholarly communications system must adopt and encourage open data protocols. This is a topic I will discuss further in my later post regarding standards compliance. Open data enables machine readability, making possible the re-use of data beyond the confines of the original study. This will require scholars and/or publishers to cooperate with institutional or disciplinary repositories in order to archive permanent access to data sets, models, and instruments (and prepare these appropriately with metadata). It will also require educating ourselves (those of us who are not programmers) regarding the nature and importance of open APIs (application programming interfaces). Our data must be readied for full digital citizenship if we want our scholarly work to have its greatest impact. It cannot have that broadened impact if data is kept proprietary and closed off from secondary and public uses.

So, in summary, an open scholarly communications system would include

• Open Access
• Open Review
• Open Dialogue
• Open Process
• Open Formats
• Open Data

Did I miss any aspects of open scholarship? Do you agree that scholarship needs to be open in more ways than just Open Access? I will try to stay open to your critiques and suggestions.

Next up in this series on how scholarly communications must transform: Scholarly Communications must be Standards-Compliant.