Scholarship in the 21st century is extensive, expensive, intensive and complicated. Many of the factors leading to complexity are accelerating. The affordances of networked digital technology now allow scholarship to be undertaken and shared in ways unimaginable just a generation ago. That expansion and acceleration has happened alongside globalisation more generally, the spread of the Web in particular and, contrary to the expectations of its original architects, the rapid emergence of platforms that act as central points of control. Dempsey (Dempsey 2005) observed that Amazon and Google were 'massive gravitational hubs'. That is a familiar qualification, and we can add the social media giants and cloud services, such as Facebook, Dropbox, Skype and many more, to these hubs. Dempsey also noted that
Footnotes
33 Indeed, all disciplines are different from their original progenitor in the western tradition, theology. The sciences are, after all, a subset of the humanities, not the other way around. The humanities, strictly speaking, are everything that is not the divinities.
“They are tied into the fabric of user behaviours and applications through an infrastructural tissue of lightweight, loosely coupled, webby approaches. They make data work hard: they extract as much intelligence as possible from growing reservoirs of data, and their services
adapt reflexively, based on accumulated data
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective actionThe truth of the last sentence about data has recently become a notorious issue, with scandals such as the actions of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in US and UK democratic processes34. What Dempsey
(Dempsey, 2005) describes as ‘gravitational hubs’ is the result of network effects. This concept explains a mostly positive effect that an additional user of a good or service has on the value of that product. The financial aspects of this value have drawn capital, and venture capitalists, to products that offer these network effects, creating massive and architecturally flat systems that are designed to grow as fast as possible, accumulating as much attention and data, and as many users, as possible. Capital is turned to enhancing those effects, creating a positive feedback loop that was decried by Jeff Hammerbacher35 as leading to a situation where
“the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads” (Vance 2011).
The link between financial capital and network effects is not surprising, at least in retrospect. This is what competitive markets are best at, identifying value and bringing capital to bear on it to generate further private goods. What is perhaps more surprising is the way these network effects have also been linked to prestige. The academy is not simply failing to compete for the attention of those ‘best minds’ on problems of societal interest by providing less money than enhancing click-throughs, it has also lost its prestige, authority and credibility as a source of reliable knowledge. Prestige and cultural authority have often been connected to finances. The sponsors and patrons of early scholars sought prestige through expenditure on knowledge creation and the arts.
Many would argue that the loss of (perhaps largely unearned) authority is a good thing for the academy. Certainly a greater involvement with wider communities is part of the agenda of Open Scholarship. Engaging with global scholarly communities will require a greater respect for different kinds of knowledge and knowing.
But equally, if scholarly knowledge is to have value, it must garner societal and community acceptance, even respect. If we discard traditional ‘authority’ based merely on prestige then we must earn new kinds of respect (which is simply prestige with a positive spin) and build new coalitions to achieve that.
Within the scholarly landscape the same issues play out at many scales, and in each of the four arenas in the KE OS Framework. If the above focused on the political and social arenas we also need to examine the parallel issues in the technical arena to return to the economic argument. As services with network effects continue to grow in size and improve over time (for example, as a result of user interface design), it becomes increasingly difficult for local solutions from the academic system to compete.
As with the Silicon Valley examples, the value that is being created and captured in these networked systems attracts those with free capital who can invest in enhancing them further. These are systematically commercial providers who combine free capital and the freedom to deploy it.
Footnotes
34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scanda 35 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hammerbacher
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective action
Commercial providers are consolidating the most diverse services, not just offering solutions but developing complete ecosystems that the academic institutions and communities are finding increasingly difficult to escape. Even if parts of the academic system decide not to participate in these ecosystems, they soon realise the serious consequences of this decision. Those who do not participate in the ecosystem have a smaller reach, are evaluated less favourably and have fewer opportunities for collaboration: all important for scientists.
Consequently, researchers are dependent on
ecosystems, which in turn empowers the operator of that system to systematically increase the cost of staying in the system and maximise the cost of leaving. The user-friendliness for researchers is significantly improved. They have digital tools that they often don't even have to pay for, their research has a wide reach and they get an extensive look at what other scientists produce. However, the increased cost of either staying or leaving established systems creates a dependency with no real alternative.
What is a major concern is that services founded without commercial interest, that have grown organically within scholarly communities, change ownership
essentially overnight, and thus the value accumulated in the networked services can be leveraged for increased market control and commercial purposes. One example of this we have already covered is SSRN. Though the service is operating largely unchanged for end-users, giving full power and control of the service and its data to the largest commercial publisher ensures that the service policies and future development do not form a threat to commercial interests.
Another example highlighting that large academic publishers are seeking to buy up and monopolise the digital platforms that scholars use for their work is Elsevier's acquisition of US-based Aries Systems36.
Aries Systems offers workflow tools for academics, and the acquisition is seen by some observers as the latest step in a strategy by big publishers to create an end-to- end platform on which academics do everything from devising a research question all the way to tracking how many citations the resulting paper garners. In many ways, such a platform could make life easier for
academics – but it could also lock them into a particular publisher’s system. If that happens, some fear, large publishers with a captive audience could raise prices at will and also gain even more power over the research process. Acquisitions like this can also be interpreted as defensive moves, where potential threats of emerging alternative practices are extinguished before they become negative impacts on the bottom line. The challenge here is to not simply observe and bewail that things have gone wrong, but to ask how we can collectively design institutions that are capable of achieving scale and delivering on our aspirations for greater openness. It is through a rigorous application of our understanding of the way in which institutions can solve collective action problems that we will be able to identify the possibilities and design principles that preserve academic autonomy, while solving the ever- larger problems we face in a globalised, networked world. The institutions that make up the rich tapestry of the scholarly world (journals, conferences, societies etc) are bit by bit eroded by platforms that favour homogeneous services that can be used by the widest range of users. For example, the humanities are perhaps the discipline most strongly resisting the long-term trend toward journal articles and citation metrics being the homogeneous form of scholarly communication and evaluation, and the platforms and services that underpin Footnotes
36 elsevier.com/about/press-releases/corporate/elsevier-closes- its-acquisition-of-aries-systems
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective actionthat form. In other disciplines, societies have either become indistinguishable from commercial publishers, or have contracted their journals to those publishers, making those journals profit centres rather than institutions that act in the best interest of scholarship. In order to deal with this, we must understand how the organisational structure of the academic system functions and what form of action is actually possible within it. Therefore, in the following section we will discuss why collective action is such an important method to make the science system capable of operating in its own best interest.