Imagining the ‘open’ university: Sharing scholarship to improve research and education
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Science and Medical Education, Science Policy
- Keywords
- open access, open data, open science, open research, academia, open education, open scholarship
- Copyright
- © 2017 McKiernan
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Imagining the ‘open’ university: Sharing scholarship to improve research and education. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2711v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2711v3
Abstract
Open scholarship, such as the sharing of articles, code, data, and educational resources, has the potential to improve university research and education, as well as increase the impact universities can have beyond their own walls. To support this perspective, I present evidence from case studies, published literature, and personal experiences as a practicing open scholar. I describe some of the challenges inherent to practicing open scholarship, and some of the tensions created by incompatibilities between institutional policies and personal practice. To address this, I propose several concrete actions universities could take to support open scholarship, and outline ways in which such initiatives could benefit the public as well as institutions. Importantly, I do not think most of these actions would require new funding, but rather a redistribution of existing funds and a rewriting of internal policies to better align with university missions of knowledge dissemination and societal impact.
Author Comment
This is version 3 of a submission to PeerJ PrePrints. Based on reviewer feedback, I have revised the manuscript to elaborate on the importance of academic culture in influencing faculty practices, and added recommendations on how the university could outwardly signal its support of open scholarship to help change this culture.