# How to be an open scholar (OA week 2010)


[](http://www.openaccessweek.org/)[![](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Screen-shot-2010-10-24-at-4.42.18-PM.png)](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Screen-shot-2010-10-24-at-4.42.18-PM.png)Open
Access Week is a great idea - now in its fourth year, it really enables
communities to come together across the world to promote the concept of
Open Access. Last year, we had a number of very successful events at
University of Toronto, I gave a talk about institutional models for OER
([video](http://connect.oise.utoronto.ca/p98085499/),[Mp3](http://www.archive.org/details/InnovativeProjectsInThePublishingOfOpenEducationalResources),
[slides](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/innovative-projects-in-the-publishing-of-open-educational-resources)),
and [John Willinsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Willinsky)
([video](http://mediaspace.oise.utoronto.ca:8888/tinkerne/Willinsky/Willinsky_Caption.mov))
gave a very moving talk about how he got Stanford University's School of
Education to [embrace Open
Access](https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/4450.html).

This year, there was another [great slate of
events](http://discover.library.utoronto.ca/open-access-week/open-access-events),
and I was involved in a number of them. One of the talks I gave was
about "What it means to be an open scholar". I gave three versions of
this talk, a shorter one that was more focused on my own experiments,
and ideas for others to try, at UT Scarborough, and a longer one, where
I added a section about "future trends in scholarly communications", at
the OISE/UT library. This final talk was video-recorded, and both [the
synced
video+slides](http://142.150.98.64/OISE/20101021-120919-1/rnh.htm), as
well as the [slides
themselves](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang/what-it-means-to-be-an-open-scholar-and-the-future-of-scholarly-publishing)
on Slideshare, are available.

This is a new talk that I have never done before, and it was a lot of
fun putting it together. Much of my time as an OA advocate is spent
trying to get people to deposit their works in
[T-Space](https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/), our institutional
repository, and explaining the basics of Open Access, including [green
and gold
OA](http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/485-Please-Dont-Conflate-Green-and-Gold-OA.html).
I did mention this briefly in the beginning of the talk, but most of my
talk was trying to push the boundaries. Because while it's important to
get all of our existing journal articles out there, a huge Web 1.0
database of PDFs isn't really that exciting.

So I started out with a quote from [Academic
Evolution](http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/08/the-open-scholar.html),
defining an "open scholar":

> The Open Scholar, as I'm defining this person, is not simply someone
> who agrees to allow free access and reuse of his or her traditional
> scholarly articles and books; no, the Open Scholar is someone who
> makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and
> who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and
> secondary uses of any or all parts of it--at any stage of its
> development.

I started out with T-Space, and showed that people are actually getting
to the articles there through some very interesting pathways, including
Wikipedia articles. The problem is that there is little or no statistic
exposed to the authors, so professors will never know that their article
is linked from a Wikipedia article, a blog, or even an undergraduate
course syllabus. I think exposing this could create some very excited
self-archiving evangelists - people like to be read.

I then discussed some of my own publishing experiments. The first was
the translation of [my BA thesis](http://eprints.rclis.org/14659/) into
Indonesian, based on my [an early blog
post](http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/03/07/a-fair-trade-logo-for-academic-research/)
where I speculated about creating a "fair trade logo" for academic
research, of which one of the requirements would be to make your
research available in the language of the people you researched.  I
showed some interesting statistics, showing that the vast majority of
people who had downloaded the thesis, had been from Indonesia.

I then discussed my ongoing efforts at sharing [my MA
research](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses) on the Chinese Top
Level Courses Project. I have made the thesis available in many formats,
including ePub, and I'm in the process of blogging the thesis right
here.

I used another quote by [Academic
Evolution](http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/08/the-open-scholar.html)
to talk about sharing not only the final polished output of your
research, but also the many artifacts that are generated during the
research:

> The current Open Access model is provisioning for legacy genres and
> formats of scholarly communication. That's great for archival
> purposes, but this is not the next real destination for scholarly
> discourse. Why? Because consequential intellectual work takes place in
> myriad ways outside of traditional scholarly genres, that's why, and
> the digital realm is ready to capture, organize, value, and
> disseminate those other ways of generating knowledge.

I gave as example a Wikipedia article I've written about [OpenCourseWare
in Japan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare_in_Japan). This is
based on material from my thesis, but it's not the main topic of the
thesis - people interested in information about this would probably not
download my entire thesis, but this way they can easily find it on
Wikipedia - I even had citations, which Wikipedia loves.

I then talked about opening up the research process, giving a number of
examples of [Open Notebook
Science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Notebook_Science), and
mentioning the concept of distributed [citizen science
projects](http://www.birds.cornell.edu/citscitoolkit), for example the
Wikiversity [Bloom Clock
project](http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Bloom_Clock). As an example of
somebody who has really opened up their PhD research process, I showed
[Cormac's PhD
wiki](http://www.cormaggio.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page), where he
has put up all his research notes, including detailed notes from
meetings with his supervisor. I noted that these kinds of attempts at
opening up the process of research are not only useful to other people
in the field, but can be a great resource for students who are curious
about the scientific process.

I made the case for having an online profile, for example my page
listing all my [publications and
presentations](/blog/publications-and-presentations/),
and also made the point that I feel that I understand much better the
research trajectories and "big ideas" of some open scholars that I have
never even met physically, compared to some of the researchers in my own
institutions who I see every day (I explored this further in [this blog
post](http://reganmian.net/blog/2010/04/19/open-scholars-and-divergence-convergence/)).
I also talked about my use of
[Slideshare](http://www.slideshare.net/houshuang) and
[Twitter](http://twitter.com/houshuang).

For the future of scholarly publishing (here my the formatting of my
slides got mangled), I picked out a few key trends. I posited that we
will need to recognize new forms of scholarship in the future, one of
these could be curation, of which I think the blog [Sociological
Images](http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/) is a great example. I
discussed the shift from journal metrics to [article
metrics](http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/print/55343/), and used [PLoS
One](http://www.plosone.org/home.action) as an example. I mentioned
experiments with [open peer
review](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_peer_review), the idea of
[journal disaggregation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal),
and in talking about getting away from PDFs, cited some of [Anita De
Waard](http://www.slideshare.net/anitawaard)'s work on semantic markup.
Finally, I used [the Guardian
datablog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog) as an example of
linked data, both sharing more data in usable formats, and linking these
directly to the journal articles.

Putting together the presentation was a lot of fun, and I have been
inspired by so many in the Open Access field. I got lot's of inspiration
from my participation at [ElPub
2009](http://conferences.aepic.it/index.php/elpub/) and
[OAI6](http://www.libereurope.eu/node/369), as well as lots of great OA
bloggers and open activists in general.

Stian