Open access to scholarly knowledge in the digital era (chapter 6.4): Toward open, sustainable research communities

This article is chapter 6.4 in section 6 of a series of articles summarising the book Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access.

In the final chapter of the global communities section, Kathleen Fitzpatrick brings her expertise of working at the head of a large scholarly society – the Modern Language Association – to discuss the ways in which such entities can resist the constant commercialization of platforms in recent years.

The purchase of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) by the Anglo-Dutch publishing mega-company Elsevier created a firestorm among researchers and others interested in open-access scholarly communication, who worried that the company would seek to close down access to the network’s store of research papers or mine them for other forms of saleable data. This concern was borne out when SSRN users began reporting that shared materials perceived not to be in compliance with a newly imposed copyright transfer policy were being removed. The Authors Alliance responded by asking whether it might be time for authors to leave SSRN, and other groups, including the Association of Research Libraries, picked up the charge.

This is only one among many recent calls imploring researchers to abandon the apparently free and open networks on which they have come to rely. However, this focus on the role that capitalism should or shouldn’t play in scholarly communication risks obscuring a larger, more important point: that companies providing the platforms supporting these research communities did not share researchers’ values, and that it might be a fruitful moment for scholars to consider switching over to services provided by organizations whose interests more closely mapped to their own.

Academic libraries’ institutional repositories and other services are key examples, but even there, value-alignment remains a potentially slippery matter. Elsevier’s purchase of bepress, a company that contracted with many academic libraries to provide institutional repository and open-access publishing services, sent shockwaves through the sector. Though bepress had been founded by academics, the company’s amenability to being acquired by a mega-corporation that many hold responsible for the dire state of library budgets caused great concern. In response, many libraries sought or developed bepress alternatives.

SSRN and Academia.edu are open in the sense that anyone can create an account, connect with other users, share work, and so forth. Bepress’s products remain open, in the sense that they support libraries in openly disseminating the scholarship produced on their campuses. But they are not open in the deeper sense of providing user understanding of and input into their business and sustainability models, not focused on interoperability with other systems in the research infrastructure or in sharing research data with other entities except in a revenue context, and not in any sufficient sense in dialogue with or connected to the research community.

Alternative business models exist to user-pays or user-gets-datamined-and/or-sold-to-advertisers,, including the collective funding model provided by membership organizations such as learned and professional societies. These societies have been founded for the express purpose of fostering and facilitating communication amongst their members, and between those members and the broader intellectual world. These societies are not “open” in the sense espoused by many web- based social platforms, but are ideally open in our other sense: governed by their members, as collectives working in the interest of their members.

While strongly believing that the latter sense of openness is far more important than the former, Fitzpatrick states that the challenge presented by the current moment is nonetheless finding a way to support and sustain both kinds of openness. How can we create research communities online that invite everyone to participate, that are transparent about their governance and community-oriented in their values, and that remain both technologically and fiscally sustainable?

Open access is seen by many to just mean “free availability on the public internet,” but this presents two issues. Firstly, the real impact of open access’s openness lies in the ways that scholarly research can be built upon and reused. The second issue follows from the first: by focusing on “access”, we end up restricting ourselves to affecting the ability of end users to see the stuff we create, and not addressing concerns about what we’re creating, or how we’re creating it. This is how we end up with an increasingly
pervasive system of ostensibly open-access publishing that relies on the simple substitution of article-processing charges – that is, author-side fees – for the revenue previously produced through sales and subscriptions.

Fitzpatrick contends that if we want to make the work of all researchers available on the internet, we need a new, open, community-oriented, sustainable research infrastructure that makes data available, interoperable, shareable, reusable, and makes commitment to those platforms an important element of professional belonging.

These are the goals that the Modern Language Association (MLA) had in mind in building Humanities Commons, which aims to leverage the collectives represented by scholarly societies on behalf of the common good. Sponsored by a group of scholarly societies, Humanities Commons is both open to participation from any researcher or practitioner who wants to create a profile and share work with the community, and mission-driven, committed to the needs and interests of that community.

MLA launched the social network MLA Commons to provide its more than 25,000 members worldwide with a platform for communication and collaboration. MLA Commons supports a wide range of member interactions, including public and private group discussions, web-based publishing, collaborative document authoring, and more. Members can create CV-like profiles linking to their work on the Commons and across the web. They can also deposit their work – preprints, datasets, presentations, syllabi, and more – to CORE, the repository integrated into Humanities Commons, and share that work with the Humanities Commons groups to which they belong.

MLA Commons helped foster new kinds of online scholarly interaction amongst MLA members, but it quickly became apparent that those members, who work in increasingly interdisciplinary ways, want a space for active collaboration that allows for connections across fields. In order to create those interdisciplinary linkages, the MLA Commons team first undertook a planning process and then launched a pilot project designed to connect multiple scholarly societies. So, while Humanities Commons invites any interested researcher or practitioner in the humanities to create a free account, members of participating societies receive additional access to those societies’ resources and the ability to take part in those societies’ conversations.

Crucially, however, it’s not just researchers who benefit from Humanities Commons. Graduate students in history, for instance, can create accounts on Humanities Commons, despite the fact that their scholarly society isn’t yet participating in the federation. The hope is that their active participation, and that of their colleagues, will draw their scholarly societies to join the federation, drawing them into more active participation.

Reaching full sustainability for Humanities Commons, which Fitzpatrick reports that MLA hopes to accomplish within five years, will require the support of many scholarly organizations and institutions, as the network must gradually shift from grant-based support to a funding model based largely on annual fees paid into a common fund by participating groups. It is expected that MLA will need to be prepared to do some fundraising as well.

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of the openness of Humanities Commons is not just that anyone can create an account, free of charge, and not just that the broader public can access the material shared there, but that the network is and will remain not-for-profit, and that it will be sustained and governed by scholars themselves. MLA hopes that the network’s members will encourage their professional organizations to participate, and then support those organizations that do this work on their behalf.

In conclusion, Fitzpatrick affirms that in building Humanities Commons, MLA is not just building a new infrastructure for the open distribution of new kinds of scholarly work, nor just developing a new platform for new kinds of research communities, but helping to foster a new intellectual economy, a collectivist network that scholars both support and lead. It is that alignment between economics and values that will ensure that the open research communities developed today remain open and vibrant tomorrow.

Next and final part: Conclusion.

Article source: This article is an edited summary of Chapter 25¹ of the book Reassembling scholarly communications: Histories, infrastructures, and global politics of Open Access² which has been published by MIT Press under a CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons license.

Acknowledgements: This summary has been prepared with the assistance of Wordtune Read.

Article license: This article is published under a CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons license.

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