OSI2017 summary
Glenn Hampson
Hi Folks,
Thank you again to everyone who was able to participate in OSI2017 this year, and to our generous sponsors who made this event possible. Meeting delegates will be working on continuing to develop and refine their final proposals over the next few weeks. Everyone is welcome to feed into this process; indeed, delegates will be reaching back out to the OSI community as needed.
The challenge for delegates this year was different than last year. Rather than mapping out the landscape like OSI2016 delegates did so expertly, this year’s meeting attempted to explore the first tentative steps toward doing something about the future of scholarly communication. In the process, my take is that a few central themes emerged (and I’d appreciate your feedback on these):
1. Open isn’t free. Several groups repeated this point that the focus of open cannot be about cost-savings. Open is going to cost money---the jury is still out on exactly how much. So, if we all agree that more open is important (and that’s really why we’re all here), it is this importance that needs to drive our efforts going forward, not the promise of less spending on scholcomm.
2. Open isn’t easy. Aside from the cost involved, there is mixed messaging in this space (both in terms of what’s being communicated at universities and from whom) and a lack of incentives for several key audiences (namely researchers). More trust and understanding is needed (see the trust section, below). More balance is also important, such as solutions that involve local input and incentives (local as in geographic, but also institution and discipline-specific), and approaches to open that are more inclusive (wherein we can all agree on the idea of open and then identify 100 paths to get there instead of just one).
3. Publishing is critical. Vint Cerf mentioned this in his brilliant opening address, and it was echoed by Keith Yamamoto in his equally brilliant closing. For Vint, increasing the reproducibility of published research was paramount, and this requires increasing access, and this in turn requires a much more serious focus on digital preservation---from hardware and operating systems to software and formats. Without preservation and access, there is no modern scientific record. For Keith, the focus was on the act of publishing. “If you don’t publish your experiment, it is exactly like not doing it.” But the current system of publishing is too expensive for universities (barring any major restructuring of how much money is allocated to libraries, or how much money comes directly from the government to support publishing), so our focus needs to be on what now---figuring out who pays, figuring out what we publish and where, understanding the global impact of our solutions, making sure we’re resolving researcher concerns, and more. (Both speakers had much more involved messages than this; a summary will be provided soon.)
4. OSI can help. Several concrete ideas were proposed regarding where OSI can help push the ball forward on open. These included creating new resources for the open community (such as APC finders or open resources links), designing new open outreach materials tailored to specific audiences (instead of one-size-fits-all materials), funding studies to look at issues like how much libraries are spending on open, developing a better understanding of researcher needs and incentives, convening conversations between funders, helping to identify best practices, promoting the DART framework for open (discovery, accessibility, reproducibility and transparency), and getting behind efforts like OA2020 and DORA (both of which can be read in a more balanced light).
5. We’re on the right track. OSI isn’t going to be able to tackle this issue by itself---we all acknowledge that this effort’s current lack of staff (i.e., funding) makes it a somewhat unlikely candidate to manage a global revolution in scholarly communications, but most delegates thought OSI serves an important and useful purpose nonetheless---that what has been spinning out of OSI is having an impact, and that the approach we’re taking is exactly on the right track. Whether by being a neutral forum for broad discussion, a proponent of inclusive ideas, a convener of parties, or even a developer or funder of new products and projects, the big tent approach is better understood this year than last (although as a group we’re still not settled yet on exactly how this group should be managed, if at all). Keith Yamamoto noted one specific way in which OSI might be on target: Helping identify a set of common principles that define what we want at the endpoint. If we can identify these principles as a group, we can then make a broad model that can be adapted or adopted.
6. We’re more alike than unalike. Several stakeholder groups (in their reports) pushed back against the idea of having distinct groups. We have differences of opinion in this community, but there is often as much diversity of opinion within a single stakeholder group as there is between groups. Everyone agreed that we need more involvement from the global community, and also from researchers themselves.
7. Convergent needs are everywhere. The HSS & Scientists workgroup in particular identified a raft of areas where these often disparate communities can find common ground---e.g., on the need for visibility, public engagement, preservation, and interdisciplinarity. Convening action on this common ground is the next step. Some stakeholder groups (namely scholarly societies) felt they were already cohesive enough and well-positioned enough that they could advance agendas and promote culture change---that these convergent needs were (or could become) clear and as actionable. Similarly, the scholarly infrastructure groups like ORCID and DOAJ are ready to work together and with OSI to help promote and secure open.
8. Accountability & recognition. We need to get institutions invested in this effort (not necessarily financially). We all have a stake in the outcome. What this means in practice is to be determined. As far as recognition is concerned, several groups expressed an interest in developing a way to recognize good work in open---a type of Nobel Prize for open.
9. Trust. This conversation needs trust to move forward. There is a lot of mistrust in the system---not in OSI, which is widely seen as something of a unique refuge and a unique and valuable opportunity to speak across the aisle---but in the larger scholcomm system which has been so polarized for so long. Still, even within OSI, we still haven’t cracked through to where we’re having frank and open exchanges yet (at least in the annual meetings) about fundamental disagreements---issues like APCs, for example. How and where to have these conversations is to be determined----maybe not in full-group meetings in front of live audiences, but we can certainly continue to make progress in this regard. Scott Plutchak noted that we can’t get to this level of trust (and engagement) by meeting only once a year for a few days---more meetings and more engagement will be needed.
Anything else? This summary isn’t particularly organized---sorry. It’s going to take more time and input from you before this coalesces into something worthy of sharing more broadly. Also, the final report on OSI2017 will need to draw on the final proposals being developed by the workgroup teams.
Thank you again everyone, particularly those of you who went straight from OSI2017 to other meetings in other parts of the world (like Sioux Cumming, who went from DC to Guatemala, or Keith Yamamoto, who took the redeye to DC in order to squeeze OSI2017 in between other commitments). We already have several exciting location and format proposals for OSI2018 and OSI2019. As soon as the dust settles here we’ll start talking about these in more detail.
With best regards,
Glenn
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org
Joyce Ogburn
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Bryan Alexander
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Glenn Hampson
Yet. The final papers won’t be back for a while yet, and I know several groups are actively continuing to think through their proposals (see your program pages 7&8, bullet point 4 for details if you need more guidance here, or please do feel free to email or call me to discuss). Still, the “meta” is impressive so far, I think---the unexpectedly coalescing big picture view, which may end up being even more important.
Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)
2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org
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Susan Fitzpatrick
Might be the best approach – sum up to big solutions.
Susan M. Fitzpatrick, Ph.D.
President, James S. McDonnell Foundation
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Joyce Ogburn
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