Program Available Now: https://inke.ca/putting-open-social-scholarship-into-practice/
The last 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic have shone a light on the critical importance of open access to research and data. Commenting on this situation in a December 2020 article for The Conversation, Ginny Barbour argues that “making it the default that research is open so it can be built on is a crucial step to ensure we can address […] problems collaboratively.” But, vital as such a call is, perhaps it is not quite as easy as simply deciding to make open the default in research, or in scholarship more broadly. As Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray write in the introduction to their recent collection Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (2020), open access can be “intensely messy.” Further, they suggest, “Open access is perceived through a set of contested institutional histories, argued over various theoretical terrains in the present, and imagined via diverse potentialities for the future.” Open social scholarship shares a similarly complex layering of histories, theories, and possibilities. This becomes more true as open social scholarship grows and evolves across disciplinary and geographic divides.
Within this complex terrain of urgent calls for open access and convoluted histories and contexts of open social scholarship, how do we put theory and values into action? To consider this issue, we are organizing Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice. Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice is an online event that draws together the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and is open to all who are interested in the past, present, and future of open social scholarship. This combined event will represent the 3rd annual CAPOS conference and the 9th INKE Partnership winter gathering. We are planning for a virtual event in order to remain flexible in light of potential ongoing travel and meeting restrictions, and to provide broader flexibility for those who might not be able to attend in-person.
Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice seeks to highlight open social scholarship activities, infrastructure, research, dissemination, and policies. The INKE Partnership has described open social scholarship as creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. At Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice we will consider how to model open social scholarship practices and behaviour, as well as pursue the following guiding themes:
Community: How do we best foster humanities and social sciences research, development, community building, and engagement through online, omnipresent, and open community spaces?
Training: How can we adapt existing training opportunities, and develop opportunities in emerging areas, to meet academic, partner, and public needs for open scholarship training?
Connection: How can humanities and social sciences researchers collaborate more closely with the general public? What are the best ways to bring the public into our work, as well as for bringing our work to the public?
Policy: How do we ensure that research on pressing open scholarship topics is accessible to a diverse public, including those who develop organizational or national policy?