6 The Complete Guide to Open Scholarship Weller (2011, 136) argues that digital scholarship is “really a shorthand for the intersection of three elements: digital, networked, and open, [although it is] really the open aspect that brings about change in the scholarly communication practice.” Regazzi (2015, 163) simply asserts that the very existence of open access is due to one factor—Internet technology. Akin to a variety of interpretations of openness as a concept, the inter- pretations of openness as a practice vary depending on the goals of initiatives that fall under the praxis of open scholarship. Although most, if not all, of these initiatives have descended conceptually from the ethical ideas of the Free Software Movement10 pioneered by Richard Stallman in the 1980s and share a similar motivation, which can be described as their intention to lower or remove restrictions to use and reuse of various types of resources, these initiatives have not yet formed a coherent and coordinated open scholarship movement. Fecher and Friesike (2014) group all open initiatives into five distinct schools of thought based on their goals: 1) the infrastructure school, which cre- ates openly available tools, services, and platforms for researchers 2) the public school, which aims to make knowledge openly accessible to all citizens 3) the measurement school, which develops an alterna- tive set of metrics for measuring research impact 4) the democratic school, which aims to make knowledge freely available for everyone and 5) the pragmatic school, which promotes collaborative research as a way to make the process of knowledge creation more efficient and goal-oriented. On the one hand, a multitude of interpretations of openness in schol- arship speaks to its evolving nature and potential for growth. On the other hand, the lack of consensus about the conceptual meaning of open scholarship often leads to confusion that may prevent open scholarship from reaching its full potential in academia. At the same time, as Tarantino (2019, 66–67) notes, the lack of consensus on openness “may be an ines- capable feature of dealing with ‘open’ initiatives which are by their nature diffuse and often fractious.” Acknowledgment Portions of this chapter (with minor additions and modifications) are reprinted with permission from Martin, Victoria. 2020. “The Concept of Openness in Scholarship.” In Open Praxis, Open Access: Digital Scholarship
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