Where Should We Take Open Access Next?: Moving Forward By Centering an Ethics of Care

Where Should We Take Open Access Next?: Moving Forward By Centering an Ethics of Care

Guest Post by Amber Gallant

What is Open Access (OA)?

In 2002, a small group of scholars met to discuss the unaffordability of scholarly publishing and explore alternate avenues to make research freely accessible. The declaration they drafted, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, promised to empower authors and readers of academic research, and to “unite humanity in a common intellectual conversation” [1]. The open access (OA) movement has spawned myriad digital initiatives over the past twenty years, including OA journals, repositories, and textbooks.  

Access as a Cornerstone

OA is meant to be an avenue of accessibility to scholarly research. One of the core principles of the movement is unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly work, giving readers “the extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature” [1] for their own research or simply for the sake of inquiry. OA therefore removes accessibility barriers such as the unaffordability of research articles.  

For undergraduate students who contend with rising tuition fees and cost of living, OA removes significant price burdens. Open Textbooks Now advocates for the 26% of BC students who opt out of courses due to the high cost of textbooks. The conversation around OA textbooks is important when 40% of BC students are experiencing food insecurity under financial strain.” [3]. OA can also help undergraduates enter scholarly conversation for the first time. UBC hosts over 30 OA journals on its website as part of the UBC Library Open Publishing Program [4], many of which are student journals allowing undergraduates to participate in scholarly publishing. 

Initiatives Do Not Equal Widespread Adoption

These initiatives have increased awareness of OA, but adoption of OA is lagging behind. Even during the pandemic, only 25% of instructors teaching introductory courses, and 15% of instructors teaching any course, used open educational resources (OER) as required material [5]. Furthermore, few professors self-archive their scholarly work in their institution’s local OA repository, despite university or grant regulations that require this self-archiving, a practice known as mandated deposit. Academic librarians have enthusiastically built repositories to house the work of faculty and students, and universities have invested time and infrastructure- but they are missing OA contributors and end users of repositories and open-access journals [6].  

One reason for this slow adoption could be that current OA practices such as mandated deposit confuse would-be contributors who do not know exactly how to complete the self-archiving process. They also create questions around data ownership that go unanswered. Ask yourself, do you know where to find and how to contribute to your institution’s repository? Are the instructions clear? Do you know who to ask if you have questions about copyright or confidentiality? As a contributor, how do you know what your rights to your work are, and where self-archiving fits into your online scholarly profile? 

OA and Power Structures

The questions of data ownership, rights, and self-archiving practice reveal the social structures of power that OA can unintentionally reinforce. Leaving them unanswered creates the expectation of contribution without reciprocal explanation as to exactly how work will be used or retained. Contributors get left behind in this conversation, which is a problem when we consider how focusing only on immediate, unfettered access “depoliticizes the ways social systems of power are embedded in technology practices” [8]. 

Once you put something out there, it is part of your digital identity. OA makes those materials freely available for use. It is an admirable philosophy in theory, but in practice, an insistence on openness without boundaries can create unease among contributors. This is a problem for minority communities who may be pressured to share cultural information freely. Many Indigenous communities seek to preserve their cultural heritage through digitization. Insisting on complete openness in the digital preservation process, however, separates cultural knowledge from its natural settings and systems for the profit of others [9]. This practice disrespects the community’s own data protocols by ignoring the right of the community to govern its own knowledge according to cultural custom. 

Moving OA Forward 

How does OA fit into the world of an individual or a community? How can we respect the knowledge being shared? Organizations like the Global Indigenous Data Authority answer these questions. Where OA has relied on FAIR, consisting of:  

Findability 

Accessibility 

Interoperability 

Reusability 

GIDA adds CARE, guiding the creation of Indigenous data according to: 

Collective Benefit 

Authority to Control 

Responsibility 

Ethics 

 These principles are people and purpose-oriented [10], grounded in Indigenous worldviews and meant for Indigenous communities.  

Within the academy, librarian Cara Bradley looks at the ethics of care work as a potential path for open access to be more community-centred going forward. She examines how the four tenets of care work- attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness- can be taken up by OA practitioners and initiatives [11]. This approach is mirrored in the work of the Radical Open Access Collective, who rejects one-size-fits-all openness in favor of collaboration and mutual reliance [12].  

What these organizations and practitioners have in common is their view of OA as a process of relationality that allows us to imagine how OA fits into our lives rather than how we fit into OA. They define reciprocity, in an OA context, as a community-centred practice that respects both the knowledge being shared and the communities sharing it. They advocate for thinking critically about and answering questions around data ownership, governance, and self-archiving practice. This model of OA serves not only the academy, but the communities OA comes into contact with. 

CARE, FAIR, and Contributor Rights 

Open access should rely on reciprocity. We should understand our rights to self-archived works. We should know where our contributed work will fit into our online scholarly identities and our digital identities at large. Most crucially, we should feel confident and safe in defining the parameters of our contributions. The next twenty years of the open access movement are taking shape; they should build upon reciprocity and respect as fundamental values.  

How to Get Involved in the Future of OA 

1. Check out Digital Tattoo’s resources on Open Education, as well as this DT blog post on Indigenous Knowledge & Open Educational Resources for a more in-depth look at Indigenous data protocols and data sovereignty.  

1. Sign the Open Textbooks Now petition.  

1. Pay attention to the terms of agreement or licenses where you choose to publish your scholarly work. 

Questions to Consider 

1. What are the terms of agreement when self-archiving or depositing your work in an OA repository? Here’s cIRcle’s License 3.0 as an example – how do you feel about the terms of use and your rights as a contributor to cIRcle? 

1. What does “reciprocity” in the context of OA mean to you? Open advocate Paul Stacey discusses reciprocity in terms of “forming partnerships around the haves and the needs” . Do you agree with this idea? What can be added? 

References 

1. Chan, L., et al (2002). Read The Declaration. The Budapest Open Access Initiative. https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/  
2. British Columbia Federation of Students (n.d.). Open Textbooks Now! The British Columbia Federation of Students. Retrieved October 30, 2021, from https://www.wearebcstudents.ca/open_textbooks_now  
3. Bhat, P. (2020, December 7). How B.C. universities are fighting food insecurity. Canada’s National Observer. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/12/07/news/bc-universities- campus-food-insecurity  
4. Moorhouse, A. (2021). UBC Library launches Open Publishing Program to support UBC faculty, staff, and student-led open journals and texts. UBC Library. https://about.library.ubc.ca/2021/10/25/ubc-library-launches-open- publishing-program-to-support-ubc-faculty-staff-and-student-led-open-journals-and- texts/  
5. Lederman, D (2021, March 18). Awareness of Open Access Grows, but Adoption Doesn’t. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2021/03/18/pandemic-didnt-speed-adoption-open-educational-resources-outlook 
6. Doro, N. (2021). “The IR is a Nice Thing But…”: Attitudes and Perceptions of the Institutional Repository. Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, 7, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.33137/cjal-rcbu.v7.32145  
7. UBC Library (n.d.). cIRcle UBC. cIRcle UBC. Retrieved December 29, 2021, from https://circle.ubc.ca/  
8. Noble, Safiya U. (2012). Searching for Black Girls: Old Traditions in New Media. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] IDEALS @ Illinois. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/42315  
9. Christen, K. A. (2012). Does Information Really Want to be Free? Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Question of Openness. International Journal of Communication, 6(0), 24.  
10. GIDA (n.d.). Care Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Global Indigenous Data Authority. Retrieved October 29, 2021, from https://www.gida-global.org/care  
11. Bradley, C. (2021). The Role of Institutional Repositories in the Dissemination and Impact of Community-Based Research. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 16(3), 18–31. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip29972  
12. Radical Open Access Collective (n.d.) Philosophy. The Radical Open Access Collective. Retrieved October 30, 2021, from http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk/philosophy/  
13. Digital Tattoo (n.d.). Open Education. Digital Tattoo.  
14. Dzioba, B. (2021, November 19). Sovereignty and Tradition: Indigenous Knowledge & Open Educational Resources. Digital Tattoo. https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/2021/11/05/sovereignty-and-tradition-indigenous-knowledge-open-educational-resources/  
15. UBC Library. (n.d.). CIRcle License. cIRcle UBC. Retrieved November 28, 2021, from https://circle.ubc.ca/submissions/license-form/  
16. Public Knowledge Project (n.d.). Education and Training. The Public Knowledge Project. Retrieved December 29, 2021, from https://pkp.sfu.ca/education-and-training/  
17. Summers, Samantha (2019, April 19). In Conversation with Open Education Advocate Paul Stacey. Digital Tattoo. https://digitaltattoo.ubc.ca/2019/04/19/in-conversation-withopen-education-advocate-paul-stacey/ 

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Written By: Amber Gallant, UBC, School of Information

Edited By: Brittanny Dzioba and Rie Namba