A talk I gave for the SOLAR research group. It covers issues in open scholarship, alt metrics & online identity. It was a bit of a catch-all talk, which I'll probably refine over the next few months.

1. Open scholarship & online
identity
Martin Weller

2. Overview
• Open scholarship
• Researchers & technology
• Altmetrics
• Research approaches
• Online identity
• A model for thinking about identity
• Conclusions
• Discussion

3. What is open scholarship?
Anderson (2009) open scholars:
•create;
•use and contribute open educational resources;
•self archive;
•apply their research;
•do open research;
•filter and share with others;
•support emerging open learning alternatives;
•publish in open access journals;
•comment openly on the works of others
•build networks

4. Weller (2011) open scholars are likely to:
•Have a distributed online identity
•Have a central place for their identity
• Have cultivated an online network of peers
•Have developed a personal learning environment from a range of tools
•Engage with open publishing
•Create a range of informal outputs
•Try new technologies
•Mix personal and professional outputs
•Use new technologies to support teaching and research
•Automatically create and share outputs

5. The Digital Scholar book
Bloomsburyacademic.com

6. Definition

7. Researchers use of new tech
“frequent or intensive use is
rare, and some researchers
regard blogs, wikis and other
novel forms of
communication as a waste of
time or even dangerous” Harley et al (2010)
“We found no evidence to suggest
(Proctor, Williams and Stewart (2010) that “tech-savvy” young graduate
students, postdoctoral scholars, or
assistant professors are bucking
traditional publishing practices”
Carpenter et al describe researchers as
‘risk averse’ and ‘behind the curve in using
digital technology’

8. Is it tenure?
“The advice given to pre-tenure scholars
was consistent across all fields: focus on
publishing in the right venues and avoid
spending too much time on public
engagement, committee work, writing op-
ed pieces, developing websites, blogging,
and other non-traditional forms of
electronic dissemination”

9. Is it caution?
Waldrop 2008 (on blogging)
““It's so antithetical to the way scientists are trained," Duke
University geneticist Huntington F. Willard said... The
whole point of blogging is spontaneity--getting your ideas
out there quickly, even at the risk of being wrong or
incomplete. “But to a scientist, that's a tough jump to
make,” says Willard. “When we publish things, by and
large, we've gone through a very long process of drafting
a paper and getting it peer reviewed.”

10. Is it habit?
Kroll & Forsman
“Almost all researchers have created a strong network of
friends and colleagues and they draw together the same
team repeatedly for new projects…
Everyone emphasizes the paramount importance of
interpersonal contact as the vital basis for agreeing to
enter into joint work. Personal introductions,
conversations at meetings or hearing someone present a
paper were cited as key in choosing collaborators.”

11. A conflict of cultural norms?
What are the cultural norms of blogging?
•a willingness to share thoughts and experiences with others at an
early stage;
•the importance of getting input from others on an idea or opinion;
•launching collaborative projects that would be very difficult or
impossible to achieve alone;
•gathering information from a high number of sources every day;
•control over the sources and aggregation of their news;
•the existence of a ‘common code’: a vocabulary, a way to write
posts and behaviour codes such as quoting other sources when you
use them, linking into them, commenting on other posts and so on;
•a culture of speed and currency, with a preference to post or react
instantaneously; and
•a need for recognition – bloggers want to express themselves and
get credit for it.
(Le Muir 2005)

12. How ‘sticky’ are these cultural norms?

13. Openness allows Altmetrics
ReaderMeter

17. Social Media analysis

18. • How often do we build analytics into our
work?
• How reliable are these figures? (and services)
• What the @*@* do they mean in terms of
impact?
• If we take them seriously will we just game
them?

19. Research skills
• Video
• Networks
• Data visualisation
• Analytics
• Curation/filtering
• Writing for online
• Liveblogging
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/5749192621/

20. The research process
• Have an idea • Have an idea
• Write a proposal • Do research
• Submit proposal • Blog it
• {wait}
• Get funding
• Do research
• Write paper
• {wait}
• Publish
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mg7een/4550426/

21. Different granularity
• Liberated curriculum

22. Heppell (2001)
“we continually make the error of
subjugating technology to our present
practice rather than allowing it to free us
from the tyranny of past mistakes”

23. Online identity
Tag 16 my secret identity by
chanchan222
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanchan222/3219255790/

24. My online identity

25. It’s distributed
Reflections by stephen dooley
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2577006675/

26. It’s evolving

27. It’s default

28. It’s moving to the centre
Staircase of the Vatican museum by _robertC_ http://www.flickr.com/photos/r_catalano/404014466/

29. It mixes personal & professional

30. New routes for impact
2400 visitors
52,000 visitors
Open Research Online = 163 hits/month
= 200 hits/day

31. Complementary to traditional practice
Tweets can predict highly cited articles within the first 3 days of article publication.
(Eysenbach 2012)
There is evidence that open access journals
have higher citation measures, downloads
and views than those in toll-access databases
(e.g. Lawrence 2001; Antelman 2004;
Harnad and Brody 2004)
Blogging leads to more downloads of papers (anecdotal)
Personal reputation, keynote invites (anecdotal)

32. In conflict with existing practice
Frustration with old systems
Ewins (2005) “Several
committee members
expressed concern that a
blogger who joined our
staff might air
departmental dirty
Advice to play the game laundry (real or imagined)
on the cyber clothesline
for the world to see.”
Seen as frivolous
Can lead to fewer publications

33. Academic identity
Henkel (2005) “Autonomy is integrally related
to academic identity”
Dennen “the development of identity
norms …based on a viral movement of
David Snow, identity = ‘a shared sense of individual actions across blogs.”
“one-ness” or “we-ness” anchored in
shared attributes and experiences & in
contrast to one or more sets of “others”
Canetti (1960) Crowd symbols eg
the Revolution
Mead (1934) - the self is developed most fully when the individual
integrates community attitudes and values

34. So…
• Academics define themselves around shared attributes and ‘crowd
symbols’
• But open scholarship has different set of attributes & symbols
• It also allows a route to re-establishing core academic values such as
autonomy

35. Mountain folk
“It is true to say that mountain people throughout
the world – beyond their cultural, religious or
political differences – easily feel at one”
“A mountain farmer in the Valais canton has more in
common with a moun- tain farmer in Nepal than
with someone living on the Swiss Plateau”
•Debarbieux and Rudaz (2008)
Growing Alpine identity coming from initiatives & leaders
Still many who don’t identify with this though, conflicted.
•(Fennia)

36. Online academics
• Resemble mountain dwellers
• Have an affinity to their discipline
• Also have a dual identity with their online community
• Sometimes these are in conflict, sometimes
complementary
• It is less problematic for the ‘city dwellers’

37. The Good News!
• Exciting times
• Innovation is possible
• New teaching eg Phonar
• New Research methods eg social media
analysis, analytics
• New dissemination eg video
• New connections eg virtual research groups
http://www.flickr.com/photos/306/453957521/

38. The bad news…
• You have to play the traditional game too
• There is risk
• Will see increased control
• Not well understood by people who matter
• Can’t afford not to
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/5421517469/

39. Openness has won
• Open data
• Open Access publishing
• Open scholarship
• Open source
• Open tools
• MOOCs
• OERs
• The direction of travel is all one way…

40. But…
• This isn’t what we thought victory
would look like
• Openness as marketing term
• Open isn’t always open
• It’s more nuanced and subtle now
• But this is what victory is always like

41. For discussion
• Do you feel a tension between traditional and
new practice?
• Has openness ‘won’?
• What issues around online identity do you
have?
• Are there other analogies we could use?