Aligning Open Access with the Social Justice Mission of Public University

Leslie ChanUniversity of Toronto Scarborough@lesliekwchan

OPENCON Toronto2016

Open Access in the Era of Post-Truth

Why we need better Narratives about the Social Justice missions of Open

Access

“Those who tell the stories run the world. Politics has failed through a lack of competing narratives. The key task now is to tell a new story of what it is to be a human in the 21st century.” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_link

Strategy: Changing the narrative

fromOpen Access as a means to showcase a university’s research prowess

toOpen Access as university’s commitment to its public mission

Brief definition of OA

“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good.” Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002

http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

OA is possible because scholarly communication is a form of peer production in the gift economy.

OA is compatible with traditional peer review, but it also opens possibilities for other forms of participation, assessment, and value propositions.

OA expands the boundaries of research, our peer networks, and promotes closer linkage between teaching, learning, and research.

https://theconversation.com/homo-naledi-fossil-discovery-a-triumph-for-open-access-and-education-47726

Above all, OA provides expanded opportunities for scholarly participation that are inclusive, collaborative, and innovative.

But…

Changing the narrative of OA has been difficult …

http://www.ucla.edu/about/mission-and-values

https://www.ualberta.ca/strategic-plan/overview/our-vision-mission-and-values

https://www.utoronto.ca/about-u-of-t/mission

…principles of equal opportunity, equity, and justice

Overall, THE weighs research and research performance heavily at 60 per cent of the total score (30 per cent for research volume, reputation and income and 30 per cent for citation research and influence).

Asking Different Questions:

Do we want our knowledge commons to serve the needs of market or the public good?

How to align the principles of Open Access with the mission of the public university?

How could OA allow us to reconceive and broaden the meanings of scholarship ?

How do we re-conceptualize “excellence” to reflect the richness of knowledge and cognitive diversity?

http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/need-challenge-primacy-productivity-educational-metric/

Centre

OPEN ACCESS ?

Could Open Access change the current power structure of global scientific production and dissemination?

Periphery

Periphery

open access creates the potential for new spaces for collaboration and co-creation of knowledge

Metrics and Inequity

Unequal contribution and participation in science.

Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8(3): e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosmedicine/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016

Cognitive Injustice

• The Global South is gaining access, but lags in local content

• Criteria for legitimation of knowledge set by the Global North

• Knowledge from the Global South has been rendered invisible

• Exclusion from participation is still the norm

https://vimeo.com/10169351

“Weeds” or Vegetables?

http://www.worldwatch.org/kenyan-professor-promotes-indigenous-crops-solve-africa%E2%80%99s-food-crises

https://blog.ruforum.org/2016/11/23/new-publication-top-19-young-innovators-and-entrepreneurs-from-uganda/

http://www.bioline.org.br

The Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental, CRIA (Reference Center on Environmental Information)

http://www.cria.org.br/

36

: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=117328677437228595850.00044ec490b69019e64a3&z=2

Bioline Journals graphed with Google Maps.

But why Journals?

“Is the scientific paper a fraud?”“I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because it misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or give rise to the work that is described in the paper. That is the question and I will say right away that my answer to it is ‘yes’. The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific though”.

Sir Peter Medawar(From a BBC talk, 1964)

http://contanatura-hemeroteca.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/medawar_paper_fraud.pdf

1888

Format of a scientific article

• Title• Abstract• Introduction• Materials and Methods• Results• Discussion• Conclusions• Acknowledgments• Literature Cited

Fig 4. Percentage of papers published by the five major publishers, by discipline of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1973–2013.

Larivière V, Haustein S, Mongeon P (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502

“We editors seek a global status for our journals, but we shut out the experiences and practices of those living in poverty by our (unconscious) neglect. One group is advantaged, while the other is marginalised.”Richard Horton, THE

LANCET • Vol 361 • March 1, 2003

“Research or reviews that cover diseases unlikely to be encountered in the western world will not gather the citations that some editors seek.But if this commercial environment does seriously skew content away from what matters to those people the journal claims to serve, as it surely does at some journals, the culture of medicine is distorted, even harmed.”Richard Horton (2003)

Berners-Lee

Scholarly Primitives and Reputation?

Discovering Annotating Comparing

Referring Sampling Illustrating

Representing “…basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.”

John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Scholarly Primitives and the Research Life Cycle

Discover

GatherCreate

Share

The Scholarship of Engagement and Open Access

Boyer’s Scholarship of

Discovery

Integration

Application

Teaching Engagement

PUBLIC

"The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers and to our cities..."Boyer, Ernest (1996) The Scholarship of Engagement. Journal of Public Outreach. 1(1): 11-20.

Opportunities for Engagement

Public outreach and engagement

New forms of “impact”

Data sharing

New scholarly practices

Experimentations

Interdisciplinary and Collaborative

research

Professional development

Personalization

Curation

Student training

Service

CUE (Community-University Engagement) Factor – Edward Jackson

calls on universities across Canada to “increase their CUE factors by deepening and broadening their teaching, research and volunteering activities with the external constituencies that have the greatest need for sustainable solutions to the challenges they face every day”

Participedia

http://participedia.net/

http://www.knowledgemobilization.net/participation-democratization-knowledge-new-convergences-reconciliation-june-12-16-2017-cartagena-colombia/

Broadening the definition of “success”, “impact”, “value” and “capital”

Business value monetary return, financial capital, efficiency, competiveness

Scholarly value Reputation and citation; trust; symbolic capital

Institutional value Public mission, community outreach, intellectual capital

Social value Equity, participation, diversity, social capital

Political value Evidence based policy, transparency, accountability, civic capital

Concluding remarks…

• Access to Knowledge is essential for a healthy democracy

• The Rights to Research is central for sustainable developent

• Universities as centers of knowledge need to reclaim its role in sustaining the public sphere for the public good

• Open Access is a contestation over power and control over the production of knowledge

• We don’t need more metrics but alternative to metrics

http://ocsdnet.org/

Thank You! chan@utsc.utoronto.ca @lesliekwchan

http://www.openoasis.org

http://www.bioline.org.br

http://www.openaccessmap.org