Knowledge Exchange Force 2019 Workshop report: Open Scholarship and Collective Action: Introducing the Open Scholarship Framework

As part of Knowledge Exchange's (KE) work on Open Scholarship, Knowledge Exchange has developed a framework that maps the considerations for Open Scholarship across a variety of scales, phases and arenas. The three dimensions of the framework allow us to articulate the changes occurring in scholarly communications in tangible ways. 

The first dimension addresses the level of granularity (Macro, Meso, Micro) of actors; the second dimension is the phase of the research (Discovery, Planning, Project Phase, Dissemination); and the third dimension is the arena (Political, Economic, Social, Technological).

Having developed these concepts and conversations with several expert groups and projects, we held a pre-conference workshop, as part of the FORCE2019 conference, to engage a wider group of experts to test and further refine the Framework.

The workshop report

This workshop report presents key outcomes of the Knowledge Exchange workshop at the FORCE2019 conference held in Edinburgh, October 2019. The main purpose of the workshop was to test and gain community feedback on the Open Scholarship Framework, using it while addressing issues such as research evaluation, FAIR and Plan S. The report provides some recommendations for next steps towards further utilisation of the Framework, potential use cases, and other follow-up actions.

The workshop showed that:

• The KE OS Framework is a useful paradigm for working through issues of Open Scholarship. This is especially the case when seeking explanations for seemingly contradictory situations
• Using the Framework does not necessarily deliver solutions directly. However, it can enable new insights and understandings that may not otherwise have been discovered. This has a bearing on the information and other materials that should be developed alongside the framework, advising on its uses and limitation
• The meso-level appears to contain actors ranging from large-scale commercial publishers such as Elsevier, to a three-person laboratory in a small university. The meso-level may be subject to any number of (potentially conflicting) incentives, barriers, and social and technological factors
• The ‘arena’ dimension would benefit from being made more granular (to include legal issues, power differentials, and time considerations)