Leveraging the network of repositories to create change in research, teaching, and

community engagement

Leslie Chan@lesliekwchanUniversity of Toronto Scarborough

Where Next for Repositories? An open national forum sponsored by CARL in association with COAROttawa, November 10, 2016

Leveraging the network of repositories to create change in research, teaching, and

community engagement

Scholarly Communication?

Let’s Make Repositories Great Again?

Open Repositories for the People, By the People?

Let’s Make Repositories Great Again?

Do we want our knowledge commons to serve the needs of market or the public good?

Propositions…

• Slow growth of IR network is political, not technical– Political Economy of Knowledge Production

• There are fundamental mismatches between Open Access and functionalities of IR

• Causes of the mismatch– The tyranny of journal and the “scientific article”– Missions of the public university

• Re-imagining IR must begin with Re-imagining Scholarship

Changing the narrative

fromIR as storefront to a university research prowess

toIR as a showcase of a university’s commitment to its public mission

http://www.ucla.edu/about/mission-and-values

https://www.ualberta.ca/strategic-plan/overview/our-vision-mission-and-values

https://www.utoronto.ca/about-u-of-t/mission

…principles of equal opportunity, equity, and justice

Reimagining IR must begin with Reimagining Scholarship

1888

Format of a scientific article

• Title• Abstract• Introduction• Materials and Methods• Results• Discussion• Conclusions• Acknowledgments• Literature Cited

“Is the scientific paper a fraud?”“I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because it misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or give rise to the work that is described in the paper. That is the question and I will say right away that my answer to it is ‘yes’. The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific though”.

Sir Peter Medawar(From a BBC talk, 1964)

http://contanatura-hemeroteca.weblog.com.pt/arquivo/medawar_paper_fraud.pdf

Berners-Lee

Scholarly Primitives and Reputation?

Discovering Annotating Comparing

Referring Sampling Illustrating

Representing “…basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.”

John Unsworth. "Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?" "Humanities Computing, Formal Methods, Experimental Practice" Symposium, Kings College, London, May 13, 2000. http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Scholarly Primitives and the Research Life Cycle

Discover

GatherCreate

Share

The Scholarship of Engagement and Open Access

Boyer’s Scholarship of

Discovery

Integration

Application

Teaching Engagement

PUBLIC

"The scholarship of engagement means connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools, to our teachers and to our cities..."Boyer, Ernest (1996) The Scholarship of Engagement. Journal of Public Outreach. 1(1): 11-20.

Opportunities for Digital Scholarship

Public outreach and engagement

New forms of “impact”

Data sharing

New scholarly practices

Experimentations

Interdisciplinary and Collaborative

research

Professional development

Personalization

Curation

Student training

Service

Final thoughts…

• Mandating OA is not enough• The academic reward system needs to

transform to include social engagement and other forms of impact (beyond citations)

• Greater recognition of the roles of teaching and learning and services to the community

• Broadening the definition of research so that it is more inclusive and relevant to local needs

So can IR support such a re-imagining?