Étiquette : open knowledge

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The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative : Sharing data on scholarly research performance

Authors : Katie Wilson, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Rebecca N. Handcock

In the current era of worldwide competition in higher education, universities are caught up in market processes that encourage compliance with the measurement systems applied by world university rankings.

Despite questions about the rankings’ methodologies and data sources, universities continue to adopt assessment and evaluation practices that require academic researchers to publish in sources indexed by the major commercial bibliographic databases used by world rankings.

Building on a critique of the limited bibliometric measures and underlying assumptions of rankings, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative interdisciplinary research project aggregates and analyses scholarly research data including open access output from multiple open sources for more than 20,000 institutions worldwide.

To understand who is creating knowledge and how diversity is enacted through the transmission of knowledge we analyse workforce demographic data. In this article, we discuss the project’s rationale, methodologies and examples of data analysis that can enable universities to make independent assessments, ask questions about rankings, and contribute to open knowledge-making and sharing.

Expanding on our presentation to the LIBER Online 2021 Conference, we discuss collaboration with academic libraries and other scholarly communication stakeholders to develop and extend the open knowledge project.

URL : The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative : Sharing data on scholarly research performance

DOI : https://doi.org/10.53377/lq.11544

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Exploratory analysis of indicators for open knowledge institutions: a case study of Australian universities

Authors : Richard Hosking, Chun-Kai Huang, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Alkim Ozaygen, Katie Wilson

While the movement for open access (OA) has gained momentum in recent years, there remain concerns about the broader commitment to openness in knowledge production and dissemination. Increasingly, universities are under pressure to transform themselves to engage with the wider community and to be more inclusive.

Open knowledge institutions (OKIs) provide a framework that encourages universities to act with the principles of openness at their centre; not only should universities embrace digital OA, but also lead actions in cultivating diversity, equity, transparency and positive changes in society.

Accordingly, this leads onto questions of whether we can evaluate the progress of OKIs and what are potential indicators for OKIs. As an exploratory study, this article reports on the collection and analysis of a list of potential indicators for OKIs.

Data for these indicators are gathered for 43 Australian universities. The results show evidence of large disparities in characteristics such as Indigenous employment and gender equity, and a preference for repository-mediated OA across the Australian universities.

These OKI indicators provide high-dimensional and complex signals that can be widely categorised into three groups of diversity, communication and coordination.

URL : Exploratory analysis of indicators for open knowledge institutions: a case study of Australian universities

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/r2sx-xg40

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Open access and research dissemination in Africa

Authors : Katie Wilson, Anthony Kiuna, Richard Lamptey, Susan Veldsman, Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Karl Huang, Alkim Ozaygen

This paper discusses research undertaken by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) and participants during and following an Open Knowledge international workshop held in Mauritius in September 2019.

The workshop brought together key experts to explore the role of open knowledge in the creation of equitable and inclusive global knowledge landscapes.

This paper explores the role of open access and institutional repositories in knowledge sharing and the dissemination of research output from higher education and research institutions within the African continent.

The paper reviews the landscape of research output from the African continent; analyses open access research output, overviews of institutional knowledge sharing positions and the dissemination of research output from Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02544891

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Universities and knowledge sharing: Evaluating progress to openness at the institutional level

Authors : Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Karl Huang, Alkim Ozaygen, Katie Wilson

Universities are key sites of knowledge creation. Governments and research funders are increasingly interested in ensuring that their investments in the production of new knowledge deliver a quantifiable return on investment, including in the form of ‘impact’.

Ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls, and that research data can be interrogated and built upon are increasingly central to efforts to improve the effectiveness of global research landscapes.

We argue that mandating and promoting open access (OA) for published research outputs, as well as the sharing of research data are important elements of building a vibrant open knowledge system, but they are not enough.

Supporting diversity within knowledge-making institutions; enabling collaboration across boundaries between universities and wider communities; and addressing inequalities in access to knowledge resources and in opportunities to contribute to knowledge making processes are also important.

New tools are needed to help universities, funders, and communities to understand the extent to which a university is operating as an effective open knowledge institution; as well as the steps that might be taken to improve open knowledge performance.

This paper discusses our team’s efforts to develop a model of Open Knowledge that is not confined to measures of OA and open data. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

With funding from the university, we are exploring the extent to which universities are functioning as effective open knowledge institutions; as well as the types of information that universities, funders, and communities might need to understand an institution’s open knowledge performance and how it might be improved.

The challenges of data collection on open knowledge practices at scale, and across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries are also discussed.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02141887

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Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

Authors: Lucy Montgomery, Xiang Ren

This paper examines the development of open knowledge in China through two case studies: the development of Chinese open access (OA) journals, and national-level OA repositories.

Open access and open knowledge are emerging as a site of both grass-roots activism, and top-down intervention in the practices of scholarship and scholarly publishing in China. Although the language, vision and strategies of the global open knowledge movement are undoubtedly present, so too are the messy realities of open access and open knowledge innovation in a local context.

In attempting to position open access developments in China within a diverse and contested global landscape of open knowledge innovation we draw on Moore’s (2017) conception of open access as a boundary object: an object that is understood differently within individual communities but which maintains enough structure to be understood between communities (Moore 2017; Star and Griesemer 1989).

Viewed as a boundary object, the concept of open knowledge is making it possible for China to engage with the global open knowledge movement, as a beneficiary of the innovation of others, and as an open knowledge innovator in its own right.

URL : Understanding Open Knowledge in China: A Chinese Approach to Openness?

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/csci.106

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Openness as social praxis

Authors : Matthew Longshore Smith, Ruhiya Seward

Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in the usage of the term open, arguably stemming from the advent of networked technologies — including the Internet and mobile technologies.

‘Openness’ seems to be everywhere, and takes many forms: from open knowledge, open education, open data and open science, to open Internet, open medical records systems and open innovation. These applications of openness are having a profound, and sometimes transformative, effect on social, political and economic life.

This explosion of the use of the term has led to multiple interpretations, ambiguities, and even misunderstandings, not to mention countless debates and disagreements over precise definitions.

The paper “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis.

More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.

We argue that conceptualizing openness as social praxis offers several benefits. First, it provides a way out of a variety of problems that result from ambiguities and misunderstandings that emerge from the current multitude of uses of openness.

Second, it provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness that allows space for the many different ways openness is experienced — often very different from the way that more formal definitions conceptualize it.

Third, it points us towards an approach to developing practice-specific theory that we believe helps us build generalizable knowledge on what works (or not), for whom, and in what contexts.

URL : http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7073