Bringing labour into the open

The belief behind Open Scholarship is one that many Digital Humanists are happy to get behind: knowledge should be openly and freely available. In an ideal open access world, researchers and educators would share their knowledge and resources with anyone who had access to the internet. In the often less-than-ideal world, however, for-profit journals and online harassment can prevent the free production and distribution of knowledge.

For a week in June, I joined seven other members of the Digital Humanities community from around the world for a week-long session called “Open Access and Open Scholarship” to learn more about how to responsibly make scholarly communication open and accessible to the public. I was at DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, which has become one of the most well-attended DH training programs in North America.

SFU Library ended Open Access week on October 27th with a panel called Open Beyond the Academy: Building Community Through Open Social Scholarship, featuring Dr. Hannah McGregor (SFU) and Dr. Raymond Siemens (UVic). This panel aimed to discuss the ways digital humanities work is accessible and accountable to non-academic communities.

The term Open Scholarship refers to the practice of making academic research and education freely available to both other members of the academy and the public. For many scholars, educators, librarians, and students, Open Scholarship represents a positive direction for the academy as a place of public access, inclusion, and engagement. Openness does, however, present challenges, and on October 26, 2017, panelists and participants gathered at BCIT to discuss these challenges and how to remain mindful of them.