04/13/2021

A Unified, Common Ground Approach to Open

UNESCO has been exploring this landscape for over 20 years now

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Glenn Hampson, Mel DeSart and Rob Johnson. Glenn is the executive director of the Science Communication Institute. Mel is head of the Engineering Library at the University of Washington. Rob is founder and director, Research Consulting.

Regular readers of The Scholarly Kitchen understand that the scholarly communication landscape is a dense thicket of stakeholders, disciplines, perspectives, goals and solutions. For us, it can be difficult — even disorienting — to view this landscape from a higher elevation and notice that the trunks and undergrowth are actually part of a large forest ecosystem. This high vantage is important as our community increasingly debates the future of open access alongside other open solutions like open data and open science. Only a high vantage will be able to reveal the true contours of this landscape and the trails we should traverse.

UNESCO has been exploring this landscape for over 20 years now, supporting a wide variety of open efforts around the world, including the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI), which since early 2015 has been working closely with and advising UNESCO on the open access challenge. More than 450 senior leaders representing 250 institutions, 30 countries and 20 stakeholder groups have participated in OSI conferences, reports and online conversations so far, with the goal of trying to develop broad, global, sustainable solutions for the future of open scholarship. In August of 2020, a team of analysts from OSI began exploring an intriguing question posed by UNESCO leaders: Should our current approach to open expand so we don’t look just at one open movement at a time, but at the entire open movement instead?

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.