Executive Summary: Open Scholarship and the need for collective action

This is the executive summary of the full book 'Open Scholarship and the need for collective action' DOI 10.5281/zenodo.3454688

The book aims to increase understanding of the challenges to make scholarship more open.  It addresses various perspectives offered by KE's Open Scholarship Framework, combining levels (micro, meso and macro-level actors), arenas (political, economic, social, technical) and research phases (discovery, planning, project phase, dissemination).

As many of the challenges in navigating the transition to Open Scholarship are economic, the focus of the book is on the economic arena. In addition, great attention is given to the incentives, actions and influences of meso-level actors: groups, communities or organisations such as universities, disciplines, scholarly societies or publishers because of their enormous impact on developing open scholarship.

Taking in the Open Scholarship landscape, the authors of the book - experts and experienced actors in the field of Open Scholarship - look at the stakeholders and their interactions and networks. They examine the historic developments leading to the current organisational complexity, responsibility issues, conflicting motives and values, and the importance of interaction between institutions.

The authors analyse how economic models can be applied to scholarship and conclude that economic theory cannot fully explain nor prescribe how Open Scholarship can be achieved. The challenges to achieve Open Scholarship, such as gravitational hubs and the complex governance of common pool resources, are highlighted.

The conclusion of the book is that for a successful transition to Open Scholarship, collective action approaches and establishment of a supportive infrastructure are key.