Virtues of Openness

Education, Science, and Scholarship in the Digital Age

Michael A. Peters, Peter Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594516856
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317249535
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The movement toward greater openness represents a change of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets altering the modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of participation. These changes indicate a broader shift from the underlying industrial mode of production—a "productionist" metaphysics—to a postindustrial mode of consumption as use, reuse, and modification where new logics of social media structure different patterns of cultural consumption and symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily creative activity. The economics of openness constructs a new language of "presuming" and "produsage" in order to capture the open participation, collective co-creativity, communal evaluation, and commons-based production of social and public goods. Information is the vital element in the "new" politics and economy that links space, knowledge, and capital in networked practices and freedom is the essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices are to develop or transform themselves into 'knowledge cultures'. The Virtues of Openness investigates the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational value evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities. The book argues that openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results.

The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the "open text" and the written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the development of new open spaces of scholarship with their impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open science, and the open global digital economy.

Chapter 1
Open Scientific Communication

Introduction

The history of scientific communication demonstrates that the typical form of the scientific article presented in print-based journals in essay form is a result of development over two centuries beginning in the seventeenth century with the emergence of learned societies and cooperation among scientists.¹ Journal des Sçavans, the first journal, was published in Paris in 1665 (Fjällbrant 1997) as a twelve-page quarto pamphlet, appearing only a few months before the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest journal in continuous production.² The development of the journal and scientific norms of cooperation, forms of academic writing, and the norms of peer review was part and parcel of the institutionalization of science first with the development of the model of the Royal Society that was emulated elsewhere in Europe and the United States. Later, institutionalization received a strong impetus from the emergence of the modern research university, beginning with the establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810 in the reforms of von Humboldt. This institutionalization of science was also a part of the juridical-legal system of writing that grew up around the notion of a professional scientist and academic, the notion of the academic author, the idea of public science or research, the ownership of ideas, and academic recognition for the author who claimed originality for a discovery, set of results, or piece of scholarship (Kaufer and Carley 1993).

Over 180 years later, the form, style, and economics of scientific communication was to undergo another set of changes to its socio-technical ecology and infrastructure. The prehistory of the emergence of electronic forms of scientific communication can be traced back at least to Ted Nelson’s notion of “hypertext,” which he coined in 1963 and went on to develop as a hypertext system. It is also a prehistory that reveals the development of networking and network publishing in the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARP ANET), launched by the US Department of Defense in 1969, and in the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), launched by the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement and the National Library of Education.³ In this context it is important to recognize that the concept of “information” emerged from the combination of the development of modern military intelligence (breaking codes, deciphering messages, encoding information, resolving conflict of sources, etc.) and the development of new communication technologies, often also strongly related to the military context and the cooperation between the military and business sector; for instance, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which was developed in response to Sputnik, the contribution of RAND corporation (a nonprofit research-based policy organization) to packet-switching through its research on the control of missiles, and the ARPANET, constructed in 1969 linking the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI at Stanford, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

There is a complicated history of technologies of openness concerning scientific communication that we can only sketch in the briefest of detail here, as the history of scientific communication is a vast and rapidly growing field (Vickery 2000).⁴ For convenience’s sake we begin with the Macy Cybernetic group conferences and the development of the concept of the open systems in the Cold War period that was so instrumental in providing a conceptual framework and interdisciplinary program for the emergence of networked computers and the development of the Internet. The inaugural Macy Conference was entitled “Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems.” In the opening session von Neumann presented an overview of the state of the art in digital computers and Lorente de Nó did the same for neurophysiology. From the beginning a philosophical perspective was adopted that brought scientists from different disciplinary backgrounds together: Wiener talked about automatic mechanisms for self-regulation; McCulloch showed how simulated neural networks can emulate the calculus of propositional logic; Bateson presented his anthropological field work of the 1930s that distinguished between “learning” and “learning to learn”; and Wiener and von Neumann claimed that their theories and models would be of utility in economics and political science. The topics of the ten Macy conferences beginning in 1946 discussed the applicability of the logic machine model to both brain and computer, human and social communication, analogies between organisms and machines, cybernetics machines, information theory, and general epistemology.⁵ It was in this general context that Claude Shannon developed his mathematical theory of communication published in 1948.⁶ Shannon wrote,

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

Shannon’s mathematical model provided a basis for information theory, and his early work on the electrical application of Boolean algebra enabled the invention of the digital computer (an invention Shannon is credited with) as well as the mathematics for packet switching as a basis for the digital era. We had to wait until 1992 for the development of the Internet, although there were many networks trialed through DARPA to ARPANET and established in the late 1960s. From these models a variety of public networks developed, and in the mid 1970s TCP/IP (internet protocols) provided a means of unifying them. These developed as regional networks and gradually transitioned toward the Internet during the 1980s. The shift from PC to Internet as platform was a critical step before the development of so-called Web 2.0 technologies, a term coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2005 and best summarized by his meme map given in Figure 4.⁷

Web 2.0 technologies are the technologies of openness: they provide new architectures of participation and collaboration; they promote social media and social networking; they develop through wiki-collaborations based on “collective intelligence” and “the wisdom of the crowd.” O’Reilly outlines Web 2.0 in terms of “Web as Platform” (“If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era”); “Harnessing Collective Intelligence” (“Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era”); “Data is the Next Intel Inside” (“we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade”); “End of the Software Release Cycle” (“Users must be treated as co-developers”); “Lightweight Programming Models” (“lightweight programming models . .. allow for loosely coupled systems”); “Software Above the Level of a Single Device” (“What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it?”); “Rich User Experiences.” He summarizes the core competencies of Web 2.0 as:

Figure 3 Core Competencies of Web 2.0

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as codevelopers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models

Figure 4 Web 2.0 Meme Map

Web 2.0 technologies enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration, and functionality of the web based on openness (open standards, open platforms), innovation, and evolution of web-culture communities. The applications of technologies of openness to education are still in their infancy (Peters and Britez 2008), and the logic of new open systems outstrips that of our educational institutions built for the industrial age. These Web 2.0 technologies (web as platform) are based on new architectures of participation and collaboration, promote social media and social networking, and increasingly encourage wiki-collaborations based on the “wisdom of the crowd” (Surowiecki 2004) and mass innovation (Leadbeater 2009).

These new communications technologies are based on the economics of filesharing that promote mass customization and the personalization of services (Peters 2010) based of the coproduction of knowledge, goods, and services in which the user is increasingly seen as a codesigner or cocreator integrated into value creation process. The growing interconnectedness of the web has also passed into a new phase that Tim Berners-Lee calls “linked data,” an aspect of the “semantic web” used to describe a method of exposing, sharing, and connecting data.⁸

There is a set of emerging open-knowledge ecologies that can be briefly noted and sketched by observing that MIT adopted OpenCourseWare in 2001;⁹ that the Budapest OA statement was formulated in 2001;¹⁰ that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) adopted an open-access policy requiring every scientist who receives an NIH research grant and who publishes the results in a peer-reviewed journal to deposit a digital copy of the article in PubMed Central (PMC),¹¹ that the online digital library maintained by the NIH; that the Ithaka Report University Publishing in a Digital Age (Brown, Griffiths, and Rascoff 2007, 4)¹² talks of both of “creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies [that] will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media” and that “alternative distribution models (institutional repositories, pre-print servers, open-access journals) have also arisen with the aim to broaden access, reduce costs, and enable open sharing of content”; and that Harvard mandates open self-archiving (February 14, 2008).¹³

The fact is that there are some major global initiatives toward openness policies in regard to adopting open source, open access, open archiving, and open publishing.¹⁴ Yet the openness of the Internet runs deeper and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Introduction The Virtues of Openness
• 1 Open Scientific Communication
• 2 The Philosophy of Open Science
• 3 Openness as an Educational Virtue
• 4 Open Education and Open Knowledge Production
• 5 Scholarly Publishing and the Politics of Openness Knowledge Production in Contemporary Universities
• 6 The Open Book and the Future of Reading
• 7 Open Cultures and Open Learning Systems
• 8 From Castalia to Wikipedia Openness and Closure in Knowledge Communities
• Postscript Openness and the Rise of User-Created Media
• Notes
• References
• Index
• List of Contributors