Course Chairs: Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada;
Sergey Parinov, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences;
Victoria Antonova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Instructors: Maryann Martone, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience, UC San Diego;
Daniel O’Donnell, PhD, Professor of English, University of Lethbridge, Canada
This course will focus on how scholarly communication turns into collaboration. The course will have two parts: 1) the theory of collaboration and competition, and 2) the Scholarly Commons as a special case of collaboration.
Part 1: The Global Research Community as Collaboration
We will introduce a view on the global research community as a scholarly labor division system with collaborating and coordinating researchers. Then we will provide an introduction to the different types of such collaboration, and present a comparison of these types along several axes. We will introduce an abstract model of collaboration to analyze what distinguishes collaboration from communication and why people use many types of collaboration. Based on this model, we will look at scholarly collaboration mechanisms. We will discuss limitations of the scholarly publishing infrastructure, academic journals and traditional scholarly citation practice as a collaboration mechanism. We will analyze major requirements for scholarly communication tools and institutes needed to design a better mechanism for scholarly communication and more efficient collaboration.
There will be four short interactive sessions devoted to the following topics:
- What are collaboration and competition within the scholarly labor division system?
- What are incentives and expectations of researchers when they cite each other?
- How much collaboration is enough, and why might researchers not like extra collaboration?
- What are the ideal forms of scholarly communication and collaboration, and what are the main obstacles for them?
Part 2: The Scholarly Commons as Collaborative Collective
The second part of the course will consider the Scholarly Commons as a special case of collaboration.
The principles of the Scholarly Commons (
https://www.force11.org/scholarly-commons/principles) are a Force11 initiative to define ways to practice open, inclusive and reproducible science and scholarship. The principles can function as an agreement among researchers and other stakeholders in scholarly communication to make research open and participatory. There are many “Open” manifestos, guidelines and statements; the Scholarly Commons leverages these by focusing on the implementation of such statements by individual actors.
This part of the course introduces students to the concepts of the commons and some of the techniques and technologies we have developed to assist in their implementation. Because the commons focuses on the individual rather than the system, this work will be necessarily hands-on. Participants will survey their own disciplines and practice for compliance or non-compliance with the principles, as well as discuss what steps might be necessary to make more of their practice open, inclusive and reproducible. In addition to bringing the commons into their own practice, students can anticipate feeding their own practice back into the commons: what aspects of your practice, discipline, or linguistic or economic context could be leveraged by others to improve their practice of scholarly and scientific communication?
