Opening Scholarship Workshop

The first event I attended was the Opening Scholarship: Core Concepts of Open Access and Open Education workshop, which, as the name implies, served me tidily as an overview of the field and has provided material for study that will probably motivate my next few months. It was hosted by Melissa Hagemann (Open Society Institute), Mark Surman (Shuttleworth Foundation), and Eve Gray (University of Cape Town).

Melissa opened with a brief history of the Open Access movement, tracing its origins from the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2001 and its subsequent ideological convergence with similar movements in Berlin and Bethesda (comprising “the Three Bs of Open Access”), through the Cape Town Declaration, and onward to its future prospects. (Frequently, here and in the other presentations, a clear distinction was drawn between Open Access and Open Education, the first being a philosophy of free availability and liberal usage licenses of scholarly information and the second being the collaborative enterprise of professional educators to develop and distribute course materials and pedagogy.) She also revealed a number of ways in which the successes of the Open Access movement may be quantified: the Directory of Open Access Journals has chronicled explosive growth in the number of resources available, and its 3400 entries are a result both of new journals being built from the bottom up with the Open Access philosophy in mind, and of established subscription-based publications migrating to this new infrastructure; increasingly companies and organisations (including the Wellcome Trust and CERN), universities (following in the wake of the University of Southampton), and governments, are now mandating that the publications made possible by their funding be made freely available; websites devoted to raising awareness and tracking Open Access developments, such as Peter Suber’s Open Access News, are consolidating the movement.

I was particularly interested to learn about some of the economics underpinning Open Access publishing, since projects of such idealism and obvious advantage to the furtherance of human knowledge and agency have rarely aligned with the soulless corporate interests that apparently hold the universe in a vague but clearly inexorable vice-grip. Imagine, then, my pleasure at learning that some iterations of Open Access publishing have actually proven more financially viable than traditional, subscription-based services. According to Melissa’s information, 92% of academic journals allow contributors to deposit their work in Open Access repositories (such as arXiv.org, e-Prints Soton, and DSpace), many for a fee to presumably offset the expense peer-review, editing, and printing for subscribers. Where the revenue from this fee competes with or eclipses revenues from traditional subscriptions, Open Access business models start to look awfully promising (this becomes even more feasible where institutions consider channelling the funding normally earmarked for those subscriptions into paying the fees for their own researchers). Awfully exciting! As Mark mentioned later (he was talking about all academic resource publishers at the time, though it’s neat to consider it here), we may see a shift away from the perception of publishing companies as purveyors of knowledge to publishing companies as purveyors of packaging.

Mark talked about the Shuttleworth Foundation and its objective of building the Open Access philosophy into the foundation of countries like South Africa which are moving toward knowledge-based economies. The Foundation concerns itself at present with the technology of Open Education, the content generated and transmitted, and how openness drives and transforms learning and pedagogy. He mentioned the One Laptop Per Child foundation (a welcome if bittersweet taste of familiarity for me in a sea of otherwise novel information) and noted that despite the controversy, its fundamental idea of connecting kids to each other and giving them the tools to teach themselves is spot on, in contrast, perhaps, to MIT’s OpenCourseware, which does not support collaboration or content generation (he spent a bit of time looking at the OER Commons and Richard Baraniuk’s Connexions as alternatives that have more promise with regard to Open Education, rather than merely Open Access (sub-parenthetically, Richard Baraniuk’s TED Talk was my introduction to Open Education and one of the key influences in my choice to pursue this area academically. In case I’m not, as I suspect, the last person in the world to have seen it, you too may find it worth your while)).

An issue raised by the participants was that the seemingly advantageous capacity for modification, collaboration, and content generation proposed by Open Education is not especially compatible with static, government- or school board-devised curricula, in response to which Mark brought up the more fundamental disconnect between the pace at which knowledge itself advances as compared with the rate at which curricula are updated to deal with it. The perverse ramification is that, in the present system, government accreditation of a resource effectively locks it in its current iteration and actively condemns it to obsolescence in short order.

Eve’s presentation, “The Other End of the Telescope,” talked about the perception and importance of Open Access and Open Education resources from the perspective of South Africans, making the case that for the “developing world” (a strange choice for sub-division, she observed, given that by her calculations, this connoted human marginalia comprises 80% of the world’s population), a non-open system is economically almost unthinkable.

She opened her discussion with a series of world maps (what I will try to acquire and post here, like), distorted to represent relative population, publishing power, library usage, and other national statistics, making obvious South Africa’s underrepresentation, and segueing into an insight that I’ve been thinking about all night: much of the research that South Africa has produced has been targeted to European subscribers and has therefore privileged European interests (if I recall correctly, she mentioned that, in 2001, there had been more research done on the effect of Alzheimer’s in dogs than in malaria and sleeping sickness). Five years ago, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa moved to an open model and found that with its wider exposure (articles hosted by the HSRC have been downloaded by nearly every country on the planet), their donation revenues jumped from R60 to R160 in a single year---suggesting that Open Access can lead to the financial freedom to pursue research relevant to the citizens who ultimately fund it, and free research institutions from foreign interests.

More tomorrow. Sleep now.