Towards Open Scholarship at the Knowledge Exhange anniversary event: inclusive, open-minded, expandable

Pathways to Open Scholarship - the 10th anniversary event of the Knowledge Exchange (KE) initiative, held in Helsinki 30.11-1.12.2015, was a great success with active participation of almost 100 people from different European countries and the USA. The intention of the event was to explore new insights into promoting openness in research and scientific publishing.

Defining Open Scholarship is challenging. At least in Finnish there is no direct translation. In fact, defining could happen through thinking about what he most important components and main principles would be. As the keynote speaker Sascha Friesike said, "We should focus more on demonstrating the benefits of openness". CSC's Managing Director Kimmo Koski introduced his three key components of Open Scholarship:

"First of all, open scholarship needs to be inclusive. With this I mean that instead of limiting to a set of topics, users or stakeholders - such as initiatives, ICT centers or libraries for example – the ways we work have to drive the different kind of groups to work together. Secondly, we need to be open-minded. The world around us changes all the time. Multi-year strategies or annual plans might get partly obsolete and rapid changes need to be done to react to the changing environment. This requires open debate and innovative new ideas, at least if we want to succeed. Openness should not be limited only to boosting the different sections such as open source, open science, open publications etc., but also to the way we work and way we think. Third, the work needs to be expandable. Some areas are more mature and can use the elements of open scholarship already now. Other disciplines might still be looking for the possible benefits and have very little practical experience. We should be able to expand the best practices and development work to new areas and help new users to get into the system where open scholarship is utilized."

CSC's Managing Director Kimmo Koski introducing his three components of Open Scholarship at the Knowledge Exchange 10 year event. Picture: (c) Nina Kaverinen

The KE event discussed openness from various angles. The breakout groups touched upon areas like the researcher's perspective, publishing, as well as what kind of technical tools we need for openness, and what are the challenges. In the end, a wishlist for Santa Claus was put together, including concrete proposals and actions to put forward, wishes on what an ideal world would look like.

"One thing I would like to see expanding to all possible areas is the attitude towards openness. Today in many areas we consider topics to be confidential or somehow closed if not declared open. This should be turned around: If not declared closed, it should by default be open!", summarizes Koski.

On this website, a comprehensive report from the Knowledge Exchange 10th anniversary event will be published in the near future.

About Knowledge Exchange: www.knowledge-exchange.info

More information: Have a look at short video interviews from the event at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFv-76jNZlBFp6O9umdnyDA

Storify summaries from the event (Twitter hashtag #KEevent15):

Part I: https://storify.com/jpve/knowledge-exchange-10-years
Part II: https://storify.com/jpve/pathways-to-open-scholarship-ii