When Institutions Fail, Communities Get Busy: Putting Open Scholarly Data in the Hands of People Who Care. Opening Keynote, Force11 2023 Annual Conference.

Opening Keynote. Force 11 Annual Conference 2023. 18 April. Online. https://force11.org/force2023/ 

Title: When institutions fail communities get busy. Putting open scholarly data in the hands of people who care.

Abstract

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project that was born of frustration. We wanted to help senior leaders in our university to look beyond league tables and citation counts as indicators of the ‘quality’ and ‘value’ of research, and to start new conversations about why openness and diversity matter. By combining critical humanities perspectives with cloud based computing and data science expertise, we have been able to engage with publicly available data relating to global research communication at scale. 

As we have discovered, community investments in open metadata infrastructures have led to a phase-change in what open data can now deliver. Questions about the impacts of making research open; the openness of research associated with particular topics, institutions, and regions; as well as the diversity of communities making and using expert knowledge can all be explored through entirely open data sets. 

But in spite of the availability of open data sets, and the need for research evaluation tools that can support diversity and local context, commercial data continues to dominate the research evaluation space.

In this talk, I will introduce the work that the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is doing with open data; and ask what we can learn from other activist communities about strategies that work in the face of commercial monopolies and institutional limitations.