Toxic cultures plague the academy

**Yes. We are talking to, and maybe about, you**. Image credit: Pexels on Pixabay.

“What would happen, for instance, if the university were to let go of the notion of prestige and of the competition that creates it in order to better align its personnel and other processes with its deepest values? Could those institutions begin, individually and collectively, by rejecting the absurdly metrics-focused line they’ve been cudgeled into by the accrediting bodies that oversee them?” (Fitzpatrick 2019).

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft of a bit of the Open Scientist Handbook. There are references/links to other parts of this work-in-progress that do not link here in this blog. Sorry. But you can also see what the Handbook will be offering soon.

Right now, the academy finds itself in the state where failed academy institutions need to move beyond wondering how it all went so wrong, and start answering questions about their toxic cultures:

· How did university teaching become a miasma of grossly underpaid adjuncts, soft-money science staff, and administrative bloat?

· Why does doing research mean spending four months of every year writing grant proposals for programs that have an 18% success rate?

· How come hyper-competition is allowed to dominate what should, instead, be a hyper-cooperative endeavor? It’s science, not boxing.

· When did higher education become a ponzi scheme for the financial sector: where government spending over the next decade will be dwarfed by the trillions in additional student debt owed to big banks (This is a USA-centric condition)? Students should not have to become servants indentured to the financial sector of the global economy just to finish their education.

· How did we arrive at an academy where sexism is so pervasive that a large percentage of women simply leave instead of facing a lifetime of symbolic violence and professional hostility? Karen Kelski (2019) created an open Google Doc (Accessed May 13, 2019) where academics can self-report incidents of sexual harassment. More than two-thousand entries later, it is a testament to the current toxic situation in the academy.

Culture repair

Three underlying, systemic conditions that are intrinsically toxic, and which challenge other cultural practices in the academy, are well described by Yochai Benkler’s (2016) discussion of “dimensions of tension;” (Accessed August 7, 2020):

“The first [tension] is the concern with the power of hierarchy; the power within an organization to be controlling…
…A second is the concern with the power of property… [T]he problem is, of course, that property is always an organization force for oligarchy; the re-creation of power around who owns it…
And the third… is the tyranny of of the margin. The need to constantly compete in the market and find yourself in a context where you have to compete, you have to survive, you have to return returns-on-investment; and this ends up postponing the ethical commitment, because you can’t live with it.…”
So this tyranny of the margin is a real constraint that we have to find a way how to break out of.”

These three tensions are addressed by open science efforts through cultural practices that reassert core science norms: 1) fierce equality, which subverts hierarchy (Fierce Equality) (See also: Shaming the Giants); 2) Demand sharing, which opens up the scholarly gift economy (Demand Sharing) (See also: Scholarly Commons and Against Patents in the Academy), and; 3) Kindness, Culture, and Caring: creating cures for the neoliberal academy (See also: The Joy of Discovery, and the Love of Science, and The practical wisdom in doing science).

The sources for the toxic damage to cultures within the academy are multiple and their impacts global. Almost any organizational culture will go toxic if simply ignored; cultures in the academy have also been warped through intentions. One noticeable result is an old nemesis: jerks in charge, or just in the room. Bad actors in the academy may rely on status quo organizational norms and rules to support their behaviors. An non-reflexive, internally-conflicted cultural milieu gives them cover for their self-promotion. They can become powerful adversaries to culture change. This condition is so common, it has its own chapter in the Handbook: Open Science: the Need for a Zero-Asshole Zone.

**All it takes is one asshole to ruin you life.** Photo Credit: Igor Pavlov on Flickr

Since toxic culture often supports and even applauds bad behaviors (centered around self-promotion and a lack of empathy), toxic organizations actually grow jerks (by allowing jerkish behaviors) internally over time. These assholes-of-convenience may be happier when the organizational culture becomes post-toxic. Authentic bad actors bring their own more durable personality problems to the table.

Jerks are also what Grant (2013) calls “takers.” Takers gobble up resources without contributing their share: “Takers have a distinctive signature: they like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting their own interests ahead of others’ needs. Takers believe that the world is a competitive, dog-eat-dog place. They feel that to succeed, they need to be better than others. To prove their competence, they self-promote and make sure they get plenty of credit for their efforts.”

Takers are easy to spot in asynchronous internet discussions; they offer little and demand much. Once you are certain that these people are bad actors they might get added to your own memory/list of toxic weak-tie associates, and can be avoided (delisted, blocked, etc.), and others can be warned about them. Gossip within the academy can offer a low-cost corrective to bad actors (either confirming other’s perceptions, or creating back-channel opportunities for rethinking one’s own evaluation of the “bad actor” (See: Feinberg et al. 2012).

Of course, not all scientists who are opposed to organizational change are bad actors. They may simply see the current system as having worked well for them, and hold the opinion that change might not lead to a better working situation. They might prefer their current situation, however toxic, over one that is more experimental, as all new cultural endeavors need to be. Benkler’s observation about “postponing the ethical commitment” can be evidenced by a consequent deluge of bullshit in the academy.

On becoming a scientist: escape from bullshit

“A scientist who is not concerned with the reproducibility of their experiment is quite simply, and somewhat paradigmatically, a bullshitter” (Frankfurt 2009).

When a scientist steps up to play the infinite game (Open Science and the Infinite Game) with her chosen object of study, there is no space, no incentive, no possible reward, for inauthentic actions. Rigor, transparency, insight, diligence: these are all marks of a congruent mind bound to the mystery it must resolve. This is not to say that scientists are necessarily saints. But rather, that the part of them that is most integral to their research must be congruent in the effort. Everything else is bullshit.

Under the logic of neo-liberal economics, where conflicts of interest intercept science practice, some scientists will cheat on the truth. When a scientist, or team of scientists, cannot own up to their failure, then; “the lack of a variety of knowledge sufficient to know what a truth might entail means that the whole enterprise becomes a project of bullshit…” (Frankfurt 2009). One of the goals of open science is to remove as many conflicts of interest as possible. Just as open science organizations need to be assole-free zones, they must also strive to become bullshit-free research endeavors.

There are other sources of baloney in the academy, mainly from sloppy analysis, poor visualization, and lazy, biased thinking. Calling Bullshit, a class at the University of Washington (Accessed April 14, 2019) spends a whole term examining various aspects of this. Kathryn Schultz notes: “confirmation bias is entirely passive: we simply fail to look for any information that could contradict our beliefs. The sixteenth-century scientist, philosopher, and statesman Francis Bacon called this failure ‘the greatest impediment and aberration of the human understanding,’ and it’s easy to see why. As we know, only the black swans can tell us anything definitive about our beliefs — and yet, we persistently fail to seek them out” (Schulz 2011). Scientists task themselves to develop a deep, reflexive awareness of their own knowledge:

“[W]hat, then, distinguishes those who are capable of reasoning scientifically from those who are not?… [I]n order to separate theory from evidence, one must also be able to reflect on the theory as an object of one’s thinking (metacognition). To coordinate and change theory to fit new and especially disconfirming evidence one must be able to stand back from one’s ideas and see them as things that can and should be tested” (Feist 2006).

Disconfirming theories is another area where open science wants to develop more capacity, rigor, and cultural force. Today, hobbled by a publishing industry attuned to printing only the latest discoveries, theories may linger without examination:

“Science is self-correcting (Merton 1942, 1973). If a claim is wrong, eventually new evidence will accumulate to show that it is wrong and scientific understanding of the phenomenon will change. This is part of the promise of science — following the evidence where it leads, even if it is counter to present beliefs. We do believe that self-correction occurs. Our problem is with the word ‘eventually.’ The myth of self-correction is recognition that once published, there is no systemic ethic of confirming or disconfirming the validity of an effect. False effects can remain for decades, slowly fading or continuing to inspire and influence new research…. Further, even when it becomes known that an effect is false, retraction of the original result is very rare…. Researchers who do not discover the corrective knowledge may continue to be influenced by the original, false result. We can agree that the truth will win eventually, but we are not content to wait” (Nosek et al. 2012).

The academy is also plagued with what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs:” “Consider here some figures culled from Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fall of the Faculty (Oxford, 2011). In American universities from 1985 to 2005, the number of both students and faculty members went up by about half, the number of full-fledged administrative positions by 85 percent — and the number of administrative staff by 240 percent.…Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work…” (Graeber 2018; Accessed April 14, 2019).

Finite games are rife with bullshit metrics. The poster-child for these is “excellence”.

Finally, there’s a whole layer of ersatz prestige that the academy has built up around what Cameron Neylon and others call “bullshit excellence;” “‘Excellence’” they remind us, “is not excellent, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship” (Moore et al. 2017).

All these sources of bullshit in the academy are why open science needs to be based on fierce equality. Fierce equality will prompt significant changes to how societies, universities, and funders view and support the science endeavor. Fierce equality militates against bullshit excellence and privilege in the academy, against the gamification of careers and reputations using external metrics, such as journal impact factors, and ultimately against all forms of the “Matthew effect” that amplifies inequality in funding and recognition. Fierce Equality — together with Demand Sharing — enables open scientists to pursue their passion for new knowledge freed from the conflicts of interest that postpone moral decisions and lead to bias and bad science.

Toxic culture can consume your organization. It’s up to you to not let this happen.

Ways forward

Toxic culture practices are not integral to how your department, laboratory, school, college, university, agency, etc. operates. You can identify these and work to end them. This is where alternative, intentional cultural practices are essential. As an open-science culture change agent, you can help grow a new organizational infraculture to dis-place and re-place toxified practices. It takes work to maintain a non-toxic organizational culture; but a lot more work to fix one that has become toxic. How do you keep your organizational culture positive, transparent, and democratic?

“The most hidebound, bureaucratic, lumbering, terrible organization got each one of its unreasonable policies one drip at a time. Taken individually, each layer of stupid rules was almost weightless, but in quantity, they’re a smothering weight.” (Cory Doctorow (2014); Accessed June 25, 2020).

Learning from Silicon Valley

The practical advantages of stewarding your organization’s culture so that this does not drift into toxic shallows are now topics of hundreds of start-up organizational guiding books, articles, blogs, conferences, and consultant efforts. CEOs are routinely coached about the necessity of “not fucking up your culture,” (2014 blog by Brian Chesky, CEO of AirBnB; Accessed October 5, 2020). An equal number of guides outline what people generally know: how to recognize when your organization’s culture has gone sour. You can Google up “what does toxic culture mean” and get a couple hundred million pieces of advice. A lot of the conditions that are described as toxic at the organizational level resonate with behaviors that are attributed to assholes at the individual level.

Institutional guilt

One major example of toxic management practices are institutional rules that everyone knows, but few follow. This situation leads to “institutional guilt.” You are still guilty for not following a rule that nobody follows.

Institutional guilt happens when values and vision, and policies and processes are routinely broken. The routine creates an alternative policy, a counter-value, which becomes the operational norm for the organization. As this new policy and its values cannot be spoken of, it is almost impervious to change. The “real rule” is unspoken, detached from official management practices, and cemented into everyday interactions at the organization.

In a mostly volunteer organization, like a learned society, or an online network, this situation will lead to almost certain failure; volunteers will flee, staff will be disengaged. In a university department or school, employees will look for lateral transfers to less stressful units. Those that remain may do so for suspect reasons. Bullies and jerks take advantage of institutional guilt by creating a show of following the written rules and threatening those who don’t.

Institutional guilt grows from a routinized violation of your organization’s stated values, vision, rules, or policies. When enough people violate a rule without effects, the rule does not just go away. The rule becomes weaponizable as a tool to arbitrarily punish individuals. Institutional guilt is symptomatic of dysfunctional communication strategies inside an organization. It leads to distrust of staff and disengagement from the organization’s vision. Staff and volunteer disengagement/disenchantment is a prime reason organizations fail (Duckles et al. 2005). Your university needs to escape this all-too common vortex of toxic behaviors. Institutional guilt is something that will ruin your academy institution or online organization. It poisons the culture and it drives away volunteers while it demoralizes your staff.

The routines that include institutional guilt are a subset of what Rice and Cooper (2010) call “unusual routines.” These are dysfunctional outcomes, mostly of flawed communication practices. There is no organizational structure that can prevent these entirely. There are cultural practices available to repair unusual routines. The notion that toxic culture fosters jerks is only a part of the dynamic. The emboldened assholes do their part to add more toxicity over time. One of the remedies for toxic culture is to marginalize those jerks who are a) unrepentant, and b) un-fireable (e.g., assholes with tenure).

In the process of introducing the virtues and values of open science, you might and should look to see how these dis-empower jerkish tactics in your team, department, or laboratory. As opportunities and incentives bad behavior diminish, you might discover that colleagues who behaved badly in the past — perhaps including you, on occasion (getting a PhD opens up a lot of doors for bad behavior) — no longer feel like they have the need to be unkind to one another. Change the culture and you might also help others internalize the new virtues your culture promotes.

Toxic cultural practices will murder your academic dreams

Let’s recap here:

1. Hyper-competition feeds self-interested behaviors and can lead to sadism, or, more commonly, to efforts at manipulation (faking data, taking credit, undermining the efforts of others), and harassment of junior colleagues. Other people become obstacles. They exist to be defeated/demeaned or to become instruments to use in the process of “winning.”

2. Sexual harassment and intellectual bullying feeds spitefulness in those who survive this, and who later find themselves in a position to bully others. Spitefulness also infects the peer-review process for publication, employment, career advancement, and research funding.

3. Bullshit prestige and the Matthew Effect feed entitlement, narcissism, and egoism among those in career positions that have benefitted from the process of cumulative advantage. They use their advantaged position to promote more bullshit prestige.

4. The neo-liberal market logic feeds moral disengagement, delaying moral decisions in favor of expedience and advantage. Cheating on research results to gain publication harms the entire academy.

5. Organizational culture decays from neglect and the intentions of bad actors within. Institutional guilt replaces transparency and silences conflict. Workplaces become fearful and employees unproductive and unhappy. There’s a whole other blog here about how the day-to-day emotional work of navigating these toxic workplaces gets offloaded to assistants and low-paid staff, often women.

Your organization can govern its way out of any toxic culture

There are some roads that lead away from toxic practices in the academy. One of them is through new governance practices. Sometimes toxic practices get burned into the everyday life of an organization. Implementing corrective governance is a good way to build in protection against institutional guilt. You also need to be sure that your employees and volunteer committees do not fall into the trap of violating your own values and policies for some immediate purpose. Better governance opens up learning capabilities and communication channels to help limit and repair occasions where volunteers or staff do stray from your organization’s vision and values.

The next section of the Handbook will take you through the process of refactoring your organization using a form of “double-loop” governance. This is one way forward. There are others you can try. The point is, you are not trapped in a toxic culture, run by assholes who get to decide your professional life for you, or the front path for science.

Remember that decisions that don’t get made by the people who are supposed to make them get made anyhow by the people who need them. Even the decision not to decide today is made by someone. When decisions are guided by the values and vision of the organization, when the process is transparent, when the conflicts appear on the surface, when failure is just another chance at success, and when leadership opens up in front of those who have proven their worth: that is when institutional guilt has no purchase on the logic of your organization.

References

Duckles, Beth M., Mark A. Hager, and and Joseph Galaskiewicz. 2005. “How Nonprofits Close: Using Narratives to Study Organizational Processes.” In Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, edited by Kimberly D. Elsbach, 169–203. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Feinberg, M., R. Willer, J. Stellar, and D. Keltner. 2012. “The Virtues of Gossip: Reputational Information Sharing as Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102 (5): 1015.

Feist, Gregory J. 2006. The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry G. 2009. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.

Ginsberg, Benjamin. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty. Oxford University Press.

Grant, Adam M. 2013. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. New York, N.Y: Viking.

Merton, Robert K. 1942. “Science and Technology in a Democratic Order.” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1): 115–126.

— — — . 1973. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago press.

Moore, S., C. Neylon, M.P. Eve, D.P. O’Donnell, and D Pattinson. 2017. “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3: 16105.

Nosek, Brian A, Jeffrey R Spies, and Matt Motyl. 2012. “Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth over Publishability.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7 (6): 615–631.

Rice, Ronald E, and Stephen D Cooper. 2010. Organizations and Unusual Routines: A Systems Analysis of Dysfunctional Feedback Processes. Cambridge University Press.

Schulz, Kathryn. 2011. Being wrong: Adventures in the margin of error. Granta Books.

Open science badges are coming

Badges give your cultural norms footholds for members to learn and practice

“A ‘badge’ is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. From the Boy and Girl Scouts, to PADI diving instruction, to the more recently popular geo-location game, Foursquare, badges have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors, represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts. A “digital badge” is an online record of achievements, tracking the recipient’s communities of interaction that issued the badge and the work completed to get it. Digital badges can support connected learning environments by motivating learning and signaling achievement both within particular communities as well as across communities and institutions. This paper outlines and addresses a working set of definitions, ideas and guidelines around the use of digital badges within connected learning contexts” (Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University 2012).

The notion of using open digital badges to acknowledge certain practices and learning achievements has been circulating in the open science endeavor for more than a decade. Over these years, this has become a perennial “near future” augmentation/implementation of how open science can recognize and reward practices and skills. Instead of using game-able metrics that rank individuals as though they were in a race, badges can promote active learning, current standards, professional development, and research quality assurance.

The transition from arbitrarily scarce reputation markers (impact metrics, prizes, awards) to universally available recognition markers also helps to level the ground on which careers can be built across the global republic of science. Every scientist who wants to take the time and effort to earn a badge for achieving some level of, say, research-data reusability, or graduate-student mentorship, can then show off this badge to the world. Every student/scientist who acquires a specific skill (R programming, software reusability, statistics, etc.) can add a new badge to their CV.

In education, micro certifications can augment diplomas and degrees by pointing to specific skills acquired during the course of study. A badge can signal the attainment of a prerequisite skill for taking an advanced course, say, or a capstone skill for outside employment. These badges can accumulate into suites of acknowledged skills that students can highlight for specific future occupations. Micro-level open badges can be assembled into practical certifications (Leaser 2016; Accessed August 14, 2020).

“Open Badges are a specific type of digital badge designed to promote learner-agency principles. Open Badges communicate skills and achievements by providing visual symbols of accomplishments embedded with veriTable data and evidence that can be shared across the web. Open Badges empower individuals to take their learning with them — wherever they go — building a rich picture of their lifelong learning and achievements journey. Thousands of organizations across the world already issue Open Badges, from non-profits to major employers and educational institutions at all levels” <https://www.imsglobal.org/digitalcredentials>; Accessed August 14, 2020.

Digital badges are like virtual top hats: they signal achievement and belonging
Photo Credit: Sigismund von Dobschütz, October 16, 2011; CC BY-SA 3.0 on wikimedia commons

Above: German carpenters carry a book for certifications of their work while they apprentice on the road for three years to become members of the guild.

Keeping current with the latest badge news is difficult. Several projects are moving ahead independently (sounds like open science in general). Start-up credentialing companies, spin-offs from the open-badge endeavor, are building online commercial services, some of them on a blockchain, for verifiable credentials. Their not-so-open badges help companies run internal educational services and streamline hiring for specific skills (See: https://info.badgr.com/).

You can check out open/digital badge resources on the web:

Wikipedia: Digital Badges( <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_badge>; Accessed August 14, 2020),

MIT initially created an open standard for blockchain-connected certifications (<https://www.blockcerts.org/>; Accessed August 14, 2020),

Wikipedia: Mozilla Open Badges: (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Open_Badges>; Accessed August 14, 2020).

The Mozilla effort was moved to IMS global where a standard for open badges is (currently) maintained (<https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/digital-badges>; Accessed August 14, 2020).

Of course, badges are not new. Philipp Schmidt (2017; Accessed August 17, 2020) points out a long, global history of verifiable certifications. Boy and girl scouts have used badges for a century or more. Academic diplomas are badges of learning, as are driver’s licenses (in theory).

Publishing with open badges for open practices

Open Data badge on the COS Open Badges Blog

One place where badges might be implemented early is in open publishing, where publishers can add badges to their online descriptions of articles. These badges would serve to mark adherence to specific open practices: “Badges are an easy means of signaling and incentivizing desirable behaviors. Journals can offer badges acknowledging open practices to authors who are willing and able to meet criteria to earn the badge [(<https://osf.io/tvyxz/>; Accessed November 17, 2019)]. Badges acknowledging open practices signal that the journal values transparency, lets authors signal that they have met transparency standards for their research, and provides an immediate signal of accessible data, materials, or preregistration to readers. Badges allow adopting journals to take a low-risk policy change toward increased transparency. Compared, for example, to measures that require data deposition as a condition of publication, badge implementation is relatively resource-lite, badges are an incremental change in journal policy, and if badges are not valued by authors, they are ignored and business continues as usual” (Kidwell et al. 2016).

Photo Credit: Paul the Archivist on Wikimedia CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Learned Societies as badge engines

Each learned society could also host badges that members can earn by sharing their research or offering services to the membership. This is an easy way to displace current journal-based reputation markers, while acknowledging quality work, and boosting membership value. Societies can reward members whose work exemplifies those norms the society determines as core to their mission. Research that demonstrates team effort, active diversity, rigorous data collection, reusability — any practice that amplifies the value of the work for the society — might be connected to a badge.

Unlike prizes, badges are open to all who meet the requirements; there are no losers here, except sloppy science. In the post-subscription business world, learned societies need to explore new value propositions. Badges are one way their communities can tap into their collective strengths to add real value to the lives of their members. At the same time, badges serve to recognize every member who qualifies; prizes can only recognize a selected few (See Also: Shaming the giant). How about this for a culture change practice: you acquire the right combination of badges and you automatically become a “fellow” of the society. You will have earned it; nobody needs to vote for you.

If your learned society is not planning to offer badges, you might want to inquire about this. They are missing a golden opportunity. There should be a badge for that.

Does your old/current organizational cultural path lead to nowhere? Blaze a new path with open badges.

Badges for culture building

Badges are not easy to administer. Like all recognition schemes, they need to be well crafted and constantly tended to assure validation and verification. Badges focus attention on the practices and skills they announce. The governance of badge systems requires — as it also acquires — an active, reflexive cultural capacity to build trust and buy-in. One upside here is that the work of supporting badges can also help an organization maintain its cultural norms over time. Badges help build communities. The conversations about badges can bring out the virtues and values of the group.

To change an organizational culture you first need to change the way things get done now. But how do you intercept current decision and work flows? How can you help the whole group unlearn toxic behaviors? Badges work to establish new paths for decisions and activities. They offer micro-rewards that nudge a community over to new practices. Badges can include learning requirements, exposing the whole community to relevant new information. Badges are implicit promises; hold and display the “Share Open Data” badge and you better keep sharing. Finally, earning a badge is a great occasion for a team mini-celebration. Even a skeptic with tenure can get a dose of good feelings when their team celebrates their recent achievement.

As badges celebrate cultural norms, they can help push toxic practices and other, external incentives into the margins. The badge system your academy organization creates can offer footholds up to the common goal of an open science destination; everybody can use the same badges to arrive at this shared future. There’s still a mountain to climb to get to “open”, only now there is plenty of room at the top, and a reliable path upward.

Doing science right becomes easier when all the internal rewards are lined up. Buying into badges means buying out of current toxic conflicts-of-interest in the research flow (See: Building a gift economy: the dance of open science culture). It might be that open badges are the “killer app” for the future of open science.

References:

Kidwell, M.C., L.B. Lazarević, E. Baranski, T.E. Hardwicke, and S. Piechowski. “Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency.” PLOS Biology 14, no. 5 (2016): 1002456. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002456.

Mozilla Foundation, The, and Peer 2 Peer University. “Open Badges for Lifelong Learning:Exploring an Open Badge Ecosystem to Support Skill Development and Lifelong Learning for Real Results Such as Jobs and Advancement” Working Paper, Funding from The MacArthur Foundation, 2012.

Time for the academy to retire the giants

The academy can’t afford a culture centered on creating giants in their fields

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the sholders [sic] of Giants.” Isaac Newton. 1676. Letter to Robert Hooke (before they became bitter enemies). This notion was a commonplace in the 17th Century, with the implications that even a dwarf would see further than a giant if he were standing on the giant’s shoulders. (Wikipedia).

“If our team’s ideas add value to the current state of knowledge, it is because we have stolen widely and well from the abundance of prior understanding surrounding us, and climbed a stairway of knowledge built by others.” Modern version… no giants.

Open science needs to admit that no scientist is a lone giant in their field

One of the hard lessons for open science is to abandon the notion that “great” scientists — those “giants” of the academy — were and are individuals of some unique and rare quality; that their shoulders tower above those of their peers, and that the optimal career goal of a scientist is to become a giant in their field. And, if you are a woman in science, while standing on the shoulders of “giants” in the academy, you can be fairly certain that some of them would have been intent on looking up your skirt; another reason why open science needs Fierce Equality.

In Isaac Newton, the Asshole who Reinvented the Universe (Freistetter 2018) we get a picture of Newton’s brilliance as a natural philosopher, and of his serial acts of intellectual and careerist selfishness. Biographies of Newton’s career and personality issues are several (See also: Clark and Clark 2001; Manuel 1979; Gleick 2004). The biographies of several of his contemporaries (Leibniz, Hooke, Gray, and Flamsteed for starters) reveal their side of the dangers of being on Newton’s wrong side. But then Newton’s bad behavior was not as unusual as it perhaps should have been. Rather, it was distinguished by its obsessive persistence, and made potent by Newton’s position at the head of the Royal Society. Freistetter excused much of Newton’s bad behavior as emblematic of an academy culture where intellection was — and still is — a cerebral variety of blood sport. He did venture that Newton would still be called an asshole if he were working today.

Newton’s interpersonal misconduct is less of an issue here. For more on assholes, take a look at The Need for a Zero-Asshole Zone. While producing a series of astonishing research findings from his own work, Newton was soaking up ideas and credit from others, while insisting that his ideas were his alone. Apparently, we wasn’t entirely serious about the whole “giants’ shoulders” thing.

You want to get good at doing science — as a personal goal — because this leads to more satisfaction in your daily life and career, and because you can become more valuable to science by having better conversations that lead to more interesting questions and new ideas. Your getting better at being a scientist should, in no manner obstruct others on their path to getting better at this. In fact, one of the advantages of open work in science is that you can lift others during your climb up the same stairs. You can always grow. You can grow a larger sense of the science you are working with/on, a perception of how your work fits into the field, and appreciation for the work of your colleagues. Your primary challenge is to be better at science (and being human) today than you were yesterday.

A lot of scientists worked to build the stairs you are climbing

“[B]y some measure, every important innovation is fundamentally a network affair” (Johnson 2011).

“[M]odern scholarship is based on cooperation. Ideas are not created in a vacuum. Reuse of research processes, methods and results as well as abstraction and extension should therefore represent basic values of scholarly communication. The possibility to reuse data, materials and results enables researchers and communities to learn from each other and to speed up the production of new knowledge” (Vienna Principles 2016; Accessed July 10, 2020).

There’s a badge for that

What’s wrong with having and celebrating “giants” in your field? We can explore this. Firstly, the goal of exclusive achievement and individual fame requires and produces way too much scarcity in the process (Against Exclusion: open is open to all). In the game of “giant-making,” recognition points might need to be hoarded, reputation metrics jealously guarded, and ideas (and data) locked away until some strategic moment. Secondly, the practice of acknowledging a science giant requires the production of science dwarves. It’s a zero-sum game. If nobody’s small, someone can’t be giant. Most giants only look large from far away because of the cumulative advantages they were given across their careers. They are actually standing on the shoulders of privilege. Finally, the desire to be a giant fuels narcissistic behavior, of which the academy has an abundance already.

“As Justice Louis Brandeis, who witnessed our previous Gilded Age, might have said: ‘We may have democracy, or we may have praise showered on the heads of a few, but we can’t have both’” (Johnson 2019: Accessed July 24, 2020)

In a fiercely-equal, open-science culture, zero-sum games of prizes and awards handed out to would-be giants can be replaced in favor of a larger emphasis on a system of open badges that anyone can earn: with intention, time, and effort (An Introduction to Badges). The use of badges earned instead of prizes won for recognition of accomplishments would build a reputation economy for the academy that rewards achievement anywhere on the planet, and refocusses attention on science’s generative engine: learning and community effort. “Although the edifice of scientific understanding is sometimes envisaged as an accumulation of individual discoveries, in reality science is a community effort comprising innumerable interdependent contributions. Credit is disproportionately awarded to principal investigators for what is truly the product of teamwork, and nearly all scientific contributions are heavily dependent on knowledge obtained earlier…. In the spirit of an Amish barn-raising, a celebration of the collective achievement of science should subsume individual achievement” (Casadevall and Fang 2012 [ASM]).

The finite game (Open Science and the Infinite Game) of “making a name for oneself” in the academy is far too expensive to the academy to allow this to be a central goal of science. Science demands so much already from you: both rigor and wonder, and in generous amounts. “Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world” (Lewis et al. 2001).

Because it is important to regularly celebrate open science cultural practices, and contributions to science, and to institutions, and teams, you can create honors that are playful and honest (Celebrate Open Science). Science doesn’t need fellows in national academies as much as it needs researchers who deserve to get honored for their dedication and their kindness. Be generous to those who are, too. Don’t tell your team members to “leave their frowns at home,” but hand out medals (perhaps made of chocolate) to those with the most difficulties to overcome, and the best spirit. Give away prizes every week. Cheer when someone earns a difficult badge. Turn learned society elections into lotteries, and celebrate when volunteer leaders chosen at random step up and perform. Find ways to reward as many early career colleagues as possible. In the end, you realize that everyone who makes a serious attempt to do science is already a giant. You didn’t notice because you are one too.

Marc McGinnes taught for decades at UCSB. On civic holidays, he would walk on stilts as an “occasional giant.” He is a giant in many ways.

Afterthoughts: If you still want to be a giant, be a giant for your family, be a giant in your town. Perhaps there used to be giants, back when the only way to fund science was to attract the attention and the purse of a king. If the person paying your rent is named de’ Medici, perhaps you should get used to wearing stilts, just ask Galileo Galilei. The main lesson of that famous “standing on the sholders of giants” quote is that if you are going to be a life-long jerk, pop some really nice sentiments on your blog that people might remember you by three hundred years later. Even then, someone will write a book about what an asshole you were.

References

Casadevall, Arturo, and Ferric C Fang. Reforming Science: Methodological and Cultural Reforms. Am Soc Microbiol, 2012.

Clark, David H., and Stephen P. H. Clark. Newton’s Tyranny: The Suppressed Scientific Discoveries of Stephen Gray and John Flamsteed. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co, 2001.

Freistetter, F. Isaac Newton: The Asshole Who Reinvented the Universe. First American hardcover edition in English. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2018.

Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York; Westminster: Vintage Imprint ; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group ; Random House, Incorporated Distributor, 2004. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10063736.

Johnson, S. Where Good Ideas Come from: The Seven Patterns of Innovation. Penguin UK, 2011.

Lewis, Thomas, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon. A General Theory of Love. 1. Vintage ed. New York: Vintage, 2001.

Manuel, Frank Edward. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979.

The dance of demand-sharing culture in open science

Working together in time. Open science culture promotes active belonging in the community of science [photo: Nick Ansell CC license in Flickr]

“I am not saying science is a community that treats ideas as contributions; I am saying it becomes one to the degree that ideas move as gifts” (Hyde, 2009).

“The specificity of [demand] sharing… is rather that it also constitutes sharing in, granting access to the flows of objects, their intrinsic goods, and their intrinsic value” (Widlok, 2013).”

“That is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. The fields made a gift of berries to us and we made a gift of them to our father. The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes. This is hard to grasp for societies steeped in notions of private property, where others are, by definition, excluded from sharing” (Kimmerer, 2013).

So, you will want to change the culture of your organization to enable “demand sharing” (See: Demand Sharing). This is something the Handbook encourages, and, after reading this section, you will understand why. The goal of this culture change is to build an internal economy for the scholarly resources you are now assembling. This economy will do two somewhat intertwined things:

1. optimize the value of these resources, and;

2. support their use through practices that respect and enable fierce equality (See: Fierce Equality) across the global “republic of science” and beyond.

The argument here is that the current, scarcity-based market economy that has penetrated inside the academy does neither of these things well enough, and sometimes not at all. What the market economy does do is capture external motivations that appear to power efficient use. Instead, these motivations infest the academy with unavoidable conflicts of interest and perverse incentives. This form of economy ends up externalizing much of the value of research goods. These become properties held outside of the academy — from which they were born; this happens today, every time you gift Elsevier or Wiley the copyright to your research article. While this arrangement frees the academy from investing in the repositories that could hold these goods internally, and in recognition schemes to highlight great work and show gratitude to science teams doing this work, the cost is significant and ongoing: the academy needs to pay over and over again to access its own resources.

The cultural practices that support demand sharing are not simple at all. Not nearly as simple as the market transactions we do every day. They require active, culturally coded, shared intentions. Think of them as a learned, shared cultural “choreography.” Every member of the group knows how to dance with the group. These practices are durable enough to have sustained hunter-gatherer groups across the planet for tens of thousands of years, sophisticated enough to enable entire small societies to manage almost all of their internal transactions, and logical and transparent enough so that children do learn and follow them.

“Almost everyone [in the social sciences] continues to assume that in its fundamental nature, social life is based on the principle of reciprocity, and therefore that all human interaction can best be understood as a kind of exchange…
…Exchange is all about equivalence. It’s a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets” (Graeber, 2011).

Reciprocity and gift economies unpacked

Let’s look closer at socio/anthropological notions of a “gift economy” and “reciprocity,” and more recent work in economic history and economic anthropology for new insights to the “sharing economy.” In anthropology, reciprocity is a topic that has launched a thousand dissertations, that has informed entire schools of theory and argument, and that has been the wellspring of anthropology’s connection to economics since Marcel Mauss’s book, The Gift, was published in French in 1925.

The Handbook assumes your goal here, or one of them, is to avoid needing to become an anthropologist in order to be a culture-change agent. Here are the basics of gift economies and reciprocity you might call upon without further study.

Let’s start with the conclusion: demand-sharing is a form of reciprocity that requires active, intentional cultural practices to deliver an optimal return for the academy. Demand sharing is a practical/theoretical upgrade on the notion of the academy as a “gift economy.” It describes a relationship in practice between scientists and science, between scholars and the academy.

Start with reciprocity

At its core this is a durable obligation to interact with others. So, this behavior is culturally coded (more about this later). Inside the community, exchanges get made that motivate future exchanges. Importantly, these obligations are never designed to achieve a final closure. Reciprocity in life and in the academy is a feature of an infinite game. Reciprocity colonizes your future by enrolling you in longitudinal practices of giving and getting. When your child finishes college, you do not present them with a bill for all of the expenses they cost you growing up. If you do, you are planning to never see them again.

Market transactions (and also theft) avoid this type of ongoing obligation. So does charity, mostly. When you sell your old car to a stranger for cash, you have every hope that you will never see them again. When a thief breaks into your office and takes a computer, you do not expect them to give you something back in the future. When you give some food to a homeless person on the street, you don’t expect to get something material back from them later on.

Reciprocity takes more work (cultural and emotional) to maintain than direct market exchanges. It takes a shared understanding of the implied obligations for reciprocity to succeed as an economic logic. For this reason, reciprocity works best inside a community. Transactions between different communities involve more rule-making, and less cultural coding. Considering the academy as a community, or a collection of like-minded communities, some form of reciprocity is an economic logic that fits very well, once the cultural practices for this become normative.

In some cases, the implied obligations of reciprocity can negatively color the relationships between individuals: “When favors come with strings attached or implied, the interaction can leave a bad taste, feeling more like a transaction than part of a meaningful relationship. Do you really care about helping me, or are you just trying to create quid pro quo so that you can ask for a favor?” (Grant 2013).

Reciprocity can be generalized or more specific, and both forms can be active in the same culture. “Generalised reciprocity is characterised by Marshall Sahlins as being marked by a weak obligation to reciprocate and an indifference to the time, quality or quantity of the return. It is typically the behaviour found between such closely related people as parents and children or siblings, where asking for things is widely acceptable…” (Peterson, 1993). Generalized reciprocity brings in a key feature of demand-sharing: the right to ask for what you need. You can say that demand-sharing is a certain specific type of generalized reciprocity, highly coded to be efficient and sufficient across an entire group (not just a family). So, what about gift economies?

Gifting on the Playa. [photo: Bill Dimmick on Flickr CC licensed]

“Gifts in Burning Man culture are offered unconditionally. In the case of individuals who contribute to our community, such gifts are relatively easy to accept, and it is only common courtesy to recognize these givers and their contributions. …This is an application of the Principle of Radical Inclusion” (Harvey; Accessed June 17, 2020).

“These remarks on the scientific community are intended finally to illustrate the general point that a circulation of gifts can produce and maintain a coherent community, or, inversely, that the conversion of gifts to commodities can fragment or destroy such a group. To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary” (Hyde, 2009).

Understanding gift economies

Gift economies span from indigenous peoples to science cohorts, with Burning Man in the mix, somewhere. Speaking of indigenous gifting, Kimmerer notes; “The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity. In Western thinking, private land is understood to be a ‘bundle of rights,’ whereas in a gift economy property has a ‘bundle of responsibilities’ attached” (Kimmerer, 2013). A great way to dive into the academy gift economy is to read Lewis Hyde’s (2009) book, The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. In his book, Give and Take, Grant (2013) explores giving as a socially valuable practice for 21st Century commerce. Both Hyde and Grant use gifting to illustrate the value of “openness.” For Hyde, openness produces scholarly objects that grow in value as they are shared without regard to direct compensation. For Grant, openness creates weak ties across vast networks where generosity is also generative for creativity and innovation.

A gift economy uses gifting as its primary, and/or its celebrated form of exchange. There are no purely gift economies; people create exchanges for complex reasons that might not fit in this description, even when they use gifting for most exchanges (Graeber, 2001). At Burning Man, where you can find someone to gift you any recreational drug you might desire, you can always purchase coffee at Center Camp. Gift economies co-exist with other forms, such as market economies. Hyde (2009) calls this a “mixed” economy.

In a non-gift economy, gifts can still be reciprocal, even if the return gift is only an expected “thank you.” Families may send out holiday cards and keep careful track of the cards they receive in return. They trim their card list accordingly. Birthday gifts or dinner invitations to friends open up expectations of similar goods coming back. Edge cases are also available. Oprah Winfrey added to her fame by giving away cars (accessed 06/20/2020) on her television show. Philanthropy channels donations to a range of causes where the return is not a gift, but some resolution of a deficit or a wrong. In what way is gifting essential to the academy?

The idea here is simply to catch the central meaning of what a “gift” is within a scholarly community. Hyde points back to Warren Hagstrom’s work on The Scientific Community (1965): “Hagstrom writes that ‘in science, the acceptance by scientific journals of contributed manuscripts establishes the donor’s status as a scientist — indeed, status as a scientist can be achieved only by such gift-giving — and it assures him of prestige within the scientific community’” (Hyde, 2009). However, this exchange of status for the gift of a research article was, and never is that simple. The bundle of responsibilities in this exchange includes (not exclusively) assurances of research integrity, access to data (optimally), and continuing conversations about the research results. The community gets to demand what it needs to realize the value of this gift for science.

Demand sharing is different

Demand sharing is focused on a relationship between individuals and the group. Whereas a gift economy can be focused on how particular transactions are handled between individuals across their lifetimes, demand sharing is grounded on belonging to a group and knowing when and how to offer and to ask for goods from the group. You could say this is a certain form of gift economy, with added group-sanctioned cultural practices. Social distancing during a pandemic is a type of demand sharing. In this case, the group benefits when each individual participates, and the individual benefits when the whole group acts in concert.

Demand sharing resembles “tolerated scrounging” (Widlok, 2013). There is no score to keep, as in monitored reciprocity, and no specific value attached to the goods, as in a market. In place of these are cultural practices and norms that work to preserve the process of sharing, guarantee sharing to all individual members, and protect the integrity of the shared resource pool through active governance. This is precisely what “commoning” in the academy supports (See: scholarly commons).

On the open science expedition, nobody gets left behind

Demand sharing is the economy for the commons

Demand sharing practices require active cultural intention to remain clear and durable. You cannot put demand sharing on autopilot. Rules are less useful here than strategies (See: Making statements about open science). One non-hunter-gatherer example of demand sharing is what is called “expedition behavior.” “Expedition behavior involves putting the group’s goals and mission first, and showing the same amount of concern for others as you do for yourself. Jeff Ashby, a NASA space shuttle commander who has flown more than four hundred orbits around Earth, says that ‘expedition behavior — being selfless, generous, and putting the team ahead of yourself — is what helps us succeed in space more than anything else.’“ (Grant, 2011). Expedition behavior also demands that the group leave no expedition member behind.

Demand sharing begins with a recognition of the legitimate demands from others. It is other-focused. Instead of serial, disengaged market transactions that have no consequent advantage for the group, demand sharing requires and rewards engagement with others. Consideration of others, and consequent consideration by others, creates social closeness: it is a holding close of others into a sharing society.

Demand sharing has been “operationalized” in smaller societies for millennia. Demand sharing practices are local and as complex as their locale requires. “…sharing is in itself a complex phenomenon, more complex than usually imagined by those who are not participating in the economy of sharing on a daily basis” (Widlok, 2016). Responding to the specific demands of research arenas, science also groups its activities into smaller societies of researchers that share their own province of the infinite game — their own precinct of phenomena, theories, and methods. Within and among these groups, demand sharing practices will become as complex as required to fulfill the needs of the group to discover, access, and mine their shared resources.

“A basic goal of provisioning is to reintegrate economic behaviors with the rest of one’s life, including social well-being, ecological relationships, and ethical concerns” (Helfrich and Bollier, 2019).

Investing in, provisioning from, and sustaining scholarly commons in the infinite game

The main kind of “demands” in a demand-sharing academy are demands that new research be shared with colleagues in a manner that promotes rapid reuse and further knowledge generation. You can consider these as “investment demands.” These demands provide a valuable return for each individual scholar and team, which only need to add their work into a shared repository in order to get culturally-supported access to the entire corpus. You add your “carrot” (or onion, or whatever) to the shared research soup bowl, and you get a whole meal back. Only this bowl is never empty, as its ingredients are digital and non-rivalrous. So, you get a shared abundance of meals. These are “provisioning demands.” You get your fill of the latest data and research findings from across the planet.

A second group of demands center around playing the infinite game of science (See: Open Science and the Infinite Game). Within a culture of demand sharing, scientists and teams can demand that their institutions support science across its horizons, and through time within and beyond the lives of individual scientists. This means reaffirming those freedoms that allow science to advance at its own pace and without external influence, and provisioning science teaching and research as a public good (Newfield, 2016). These new demands might include a durable, guaranteed minimum income for all researchers, say, and more university funds for new projects and science infrastructure. Freed from the enormous friction of self-interested finite games where stealing ideas and the fear of “getting scooped” guide a lack of sharing (Hyde, 2009), the academy can focus on stewarding its resources and mining new knowledge from these.

The third group of demands are governance and stewardship responsibilities and activities that require individuals as commoners to work to maintain pooled resources and effective governance strategies across time. This governance “overhead” is inherently problematic when the pooled resources are open to all to use. One solution to this problem is to localize the resources (Neylon, 2017) and task those who use them a lot to step up and be more active in their stewardship. This is one functional reason why scholarly commons (plural) will need to be localized for governance, and globalized for impact. The immediate issue this solution creates is the need for robust interoperability among the commons, including some sharing of cultural norms for mutual use of combined resources.

The last demands are really the first ones in the careers of scientists: the demands that students make on their teachers and schools to provision their learning path. If “tolerated scrounging” describes how scientists gather their research goods, teaching the next generation of scroungers means more than opening up scientific content access and understanding. Open-science teaching includes inculcating cultural knowhow about the norms and practices of commoning in scholarly commons.

References

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, N.Y: Melville House, 2011.

— — — . Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Grant, Adam M. Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. New York, N.Y: Viking, 2013.

Hagstrom, Warren O. The Scientific Community. New York: basic books, 1965.

Helfrich, Silke, and David Bollier. Free, Fair, and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons. New Society Publishers. 2019.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage, 2009.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. JHU Press, 2016.

Neylon, Cameron. “Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons That Olson Can Teach Us.” Preprint. Scientific Communication and Education, March 14, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1101/116756.

Peterson, N. “Demand Sharing: Reciprocity and the Pressure for Generosity among Foragers.” American Anthropologist 95, no. 4 (1993): 860–874.

Widlok, T. Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing. Routledge, 2016.

— — — . “Sharing: Allowing Others to Take What Is Valued.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 2 (2013): 11–31.

Open science builds scholarly commons (plural) across the planet

“We see a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more generally become part of a global, universal and explicit network of knowledge; where every claim, hypothesis, argument — every significant element of the discourse — can be explicitly represented, along with supporting data, software, workflows, multimedia, external commentary, and information about provenance. In this world of networked knowledge objects, it would be clear how the entities and discourse components are related to each other, including relationships to previous scholarship; learning about a new topic means absorbing networks of information, not individually reading thousands of documents. Adding new elements of scholarly knowledge is achieved by adding nodes and relationships to this network. People could contribute to the network from a variety of perspectives; each contribution would be immediately accessible globally by others. Reviewing procedures, as well as reputation management mechanisms, would provide ways to evaluate and filter information.”-FORCE11 Manifesto

“For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access”(Preface to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003; Accessed April 13, 2020).

“Scholarly communication should expand the knowledge commons. Scientific knowledge is critical for the development of society. As scientific knowledge is intangible in nature, its use by one person does not preclude its use by another person. On the contrary, knowledge tends to grow when it is shared. Therefore, no barriers should be established to restrict the use and reuse of research results. Scientific knowledge should be a public good and as such part of the knowledge commons, in order to enable everyone in society to benefit from this knowledge.”-Principle #12, Innovation, Vienna Principles

…About beaches: these photos are of beaches in California, where the entire coastline is a public commons.

Starting points toward commoning in open science

In the following, “commons,” “academy commons,” “scholarly commons,” and “science commons” refer to any commons created to house academic shared-pool resources and governed by a community that uses these for their research.

· Science is intensely personal. Scientists are already engaged in their own struggle with the unknowns of nature in the infinite game. Science — their intellectual disease — is fortunately incurable, and likely pandemic.

· Science is already social. Just in the US, several thousand workshops a year evidence the scientific need/desire to build collective knowledge.

· Science is cultural. Self-governed science communities can use intentional cultural practices to help scientists prepare to work together in virtual organizations with shared norms and resources.

· Commoning communities open up arenas for online collaboration. Online conversation-driven collectives supported by virtual communities on internet platforms can replace expensive in-person workshops and massive annual meetings, and enable scientists to share knowledge and solve problems today across the globe.

· These communities need to consider themselves as commons to replace institutions that have been twisted by the three dimensions of external goods and influence (hierarchy, intellectual property, and neoliberal economics). Commons can address the many intellectual property wrongs that plague the academy today.

· Each commons needs to work locally, attuned to its local situation within science domains and academic institutions.

· The academy needs to harness the internet and technology platforms to knit together localized science/data commons into a global web of open shared resources and collective intelligence.

Scholarly commons are…

Intentional communities (plural) formed around the shared use of open scholarly resources (a type of common-pool resource). Commoners work together as a community to optimize the use of the open resources they share. Scholarly commons are resource-near communities. They have an immediate and professional stake in the open resources they need to use for their research. The whole community assumes a stewardship role toward these resources. These groups are self-defining and self-governing, each with their own emergent rules.

Since scholarly commons are usually built upon open public resources, anybody on the planet can access them. When these are digital resources, they are not diminished by overuse. However, these resources cannot be sustained without the commons, or some other economy. These commons represent the social/cultural destination for any number of open-science efforts.

Scholarly commoners are…

Members of these intentional communities, with the freedoms and responsibilities that their communities provide and demand. Commoners work for the benefit of the whole community and for the sustainability of its open, shared scholarly resources. An individual commoner may belong to several commons. It is the role and the goal of commoners to help these open, shared resources flourish.

Membership is implicit in a commons, and represents an active agreement to respect and celebrate the shared principles of the group. Membership will also require some attention commitment to governance and service.

Scholarly commoning is…

The practice (and an attitude) that commoners bring to the scholarly commons. It begins with a logic of abundance, and depends on an active culture of sharing. Commoning is the activity to build and sustain the commons through shared practice (thanks to Cameron Neylon for this wording). Scholarly commoning is also imbued with an ethos of scholarship/science (however defined). Scholarly commoning informs how science can be accomplished through the use of open, shared resources (open ideas, open data, open software, open workflows, open-access publishing with open review, etc.) inside commons, instead of through other types of economies.

Let’s now explore in some depth what commons look like and how they work toward “science done right.”

Commons start with people: a community of commoners.

To paraphrase Peter Linebaugh (2014): “there is no commons without commoners.”

Commoners contribute to and help govern their commons in many ways. They contribute a wide range of research-related objects and data; they ensure that these are sharable and discoverable through the use of appropriate metadata; they create “cerebration” events (See: Knowing and Conversation) to share ideas and scholarly objects, they collaborate in the development and use of appropriate standards and stewardship efforts; they acknowledge the efforts of others in their work; they promote the commons and commoning as a mode of scholarly effort.

Because commons are owned and led by their communities, volunteers are given the responsibility to envision, build, and govern these as destinations for the future of open science and scholarship. All commoners will benefit from the impacts that their commons will make on the academy’s research and communication capabilities. Volunteer leaders will also gain satisfaction that their time and efforts will grow these resources for the benefit of all and the advancement of knowledge.

A text with some history

The text below originated from an early-draft document entitled Principles of the Commons, put together by various contributions to Force 11 working groups over the past six years. That draft version of the Principles of the Scholarly Commons was based on the workshop Re-imagining Scholarship held by FORCE11 in Madrid, Feb 2016 and further refinement by the Scholarly Commons Working Group. The original Google Document for this was the product of unattributed contributions by several people, it is borrowed for the Handbook. You can check in on the current work of this endeavor here. Hop on and add your ideas.

The text has been highly revised and edited to introduce the central tenets of academy commons and commoning for this Handbook. PLEASE NOTE: The text no longer expresses the recommendations and wording of the Force 11 document.

“Before every great idea is a crazy idea.”
Jono Bacon (2009)
“The world’s cognitive surplus is so large that small changes can have huge ramifications in aggregate.”
Clay Shirky (2010)

These commons are open to all participants who accept their principles

Commons can support a diversity of skills and knowledge without privileging any. All commoners will find a home for their knowledge and their interests. As a norm, participation in any scholarly commons is not restricted on the basis of accreditation, professional standing or reputation, or any other criteria except willingness to contribute and uphold the principles of the commons. Content and behavior are the only criteria for moderation within a commons.

Commons are intellectual “rooms” (See: Science happens elsewhere) that value active sharing and collaboration. Commoners serve these requirements in different ways across the spectrum of occupations and career paths. A commons does not require a specific volume or genre of contribution, a particular professional, educational, or social background, affiliation, certification, or status.

The reach of the global commons network is not restricted to participants from any single sector or region. This network provides a home for the work of full professors, citizen-scientists, entrepreneurs, and bloggers. It recognizes the comment, the scholarly monograph, the dataset, the discussion, and the commercial product or service. It provides a home and recognition for programmers, statisticians, bench scientists, and literary critics. It welcomes the most narrowly focused specialist work and the broadest popularization. Above all, it encourages commoners to collaborate and share their specializations and interests.

Each commoner gets more value than they give as they grow their scholarly commons (note: any scholar may belong to more than one of these). The return on investment (ROI) for the commoner demonstrates how a commons as a whole is more valuable than any of its pieces. One part of this equation is due to the power of pull (See: Demand sharing and the power of pull), which amplifies the value of participation, and also the utility of each object being shared in the network.

Commons are self-identified by interests, disciplines, experiences, data sources and uses, and research goals. Commoners across the planet will be linked as their local commons builds networks with other commons to expand the “room” they share to animate their conversations and creativity.

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined” Toni Morrison.

Science commons welcome and encourage participants of all backgrounds

Fierce equality (See: Fierce Equality) means that every commons welcomes and encourages participants of all genders, social, regional, ethnic, linguistic, and disciplinary backgrounds. It also recognizes that disagreement is an inherent part of research communication, including disagreement as to fundamental principles and theories.

A commons is an ecosystem that is defined by the interactions of each and every commoner who participates in jointly building and governing it. Just like every other ecosystem, a commons cannot be a monoculture; instead, it needs diversity in order to survive and thrive. While many scholarly disciplines differ in their culture of how to generate, treat and store their scholarly objects, their commons must be open to all of them.

In a similar way, scholarly commons can not only rely on the expertise of traditional scholars. Instead, they need to be open and accessible to commoners that don’t fit the academic stereotypes, or indeed never were in academia. Creating scholarly objects and performing scholarly activities is not limited to the traditional academic scholarly community. This means that commons must be open to non-traditional research questions and answers, including those proposed by non-professionals.

Through its self-governance, a commons uses vigilance with regard to hidden and structural biases and impediments and humility and open-mindedness with regard to the life-experiences of others. Because a commons is a shared agreement, the onus for ensuring equality and diversity of access is on the commoners themselves.

As commoners build self-governance, they should consider statements on inclusivity and language policy, because these encourage critical reflection on structural impediments. Exclusion of participation based primarily on formal degrees and academic rank is discouraged. When such criteria are used, alternative routes to participation should be provided.

Equality also for objects in the pooled resource collection

Commons accept all contributed objects that adhere to their guidelines on an equal basis regardless of form

In order to improve the breadth and pace of knowledge generation, a commons will accept any contributed object that adheres to its guidelines. Because commons are grounded by a logic of abundance and a goal of reuse, they do not serve as gatekeepers or pretend to know the ultimate knowledge-value of any of their shared objects.

This means that there is no test of value, impact, significance, relevance, or endorsement that can be used to determine what belongs within a commons. Blog postings are as eligible as scholarly monographs. Highly cited papers are as welcome as preprints. Ground-breaking studies are as welcome as replication studies.

Once an object is in a commons, it is available for additional services. For example, commons services could be implemented to help commoners search for objects. Early versions of objects can be peer-reviewed. Objects can earn citations. Objects may be further curated or aggregated into collections by other commoners based on their expertise. Data objects can be evaluated for provenance and various qualities that improve their use and reuse.

Some services will not be provided inside a commons. For example, others in the academy may want to add metrics or rankings to objects in a commons. Commons have no objection to these services, however all forms of metrics should be built on transparent and open standards so that they may be reproduced and understood. Rankings will be made external to a commons and will not be housed inside the commons.

John Wilbanks: “Going back to the beginning of science: it used to belong to all of us.”

Smaldino and McElreath (2016): “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

“We reaffirm the principle that only the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which a candidate’s work is published, will be considered in appointments, promotions, merit awards or grants.”-Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 2003; Accessed April 9, 2020.

“Do not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.”-DORA; Accessed April 9, 2020.

Science commons have no intrinsic hierarchies, rankings, or reward systems

All participants and all research objects that conform to the principles of the commons are equally appropriate and available for dissemination and reuse. Attribution systems and formats are driven by the demands of transparency and the intrinsic nature of research, rather than the requirements of any reward system. Intellectual humility (See: Kindness, Culture, and Care) is expected in these commons as internal good and a norm for science, crowding out bullshit prestige.

All contributors are acknowledged on an equal basis (meaning there is no intrinsic difference between authorial and other acknowledgements); all forms of dissemination are accepted on an equal basis (meaning there is no hierarchy among genres or formats). Commoners are expected to match the form of dissemination to the needs of the research output rather than the demands of a reward system. None of this is compatible with systems that create hierarchies among types or forms of contribution or encourage dissemination in one format over another.

The fundamental premises of a science commons are incompatible with “scooping”, because the commons does not require these ideas to be new or unique as a condition of entry, even though the commons tracks when and where ideas and objects enter the commons.

“…[I]f we could solve the problem of open access within the university — that is to say, prove that the economic equation of doing research, reviewing it, and making it freely available for everyone works, then we could prove that the tyranny of the margin need not operate everywhere.” (Kelty, 2014)

“Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society.”-Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities; Accessed April 9, 2020.

“Computer analysis of content in all formats, that is content mining, enables access to undiscovered public knowledge and provides important insights across every aspect of our economic, social and cultural life.”-Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age; Accessed April 9, 2020.

“When intellectual property law allows content to be read and analysed manually by humans but not by their machines, it has failed its original purposes.”–Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age; Accessed April 9, 2020.

A commons is open by default, with a culture of demand sharing

Openness for demand sharing (Demand Sharing) is the core norm for a commons. Its resources are intentionally and reflexively open and entirely free to use, read, reuse, and remix by humans and machines, unless there is a compelling reason to restrict access, e.g., personal health information. Scholarly commoning starts with openness as a norm, and supports activities that explore open scholarship fully. Demand sharing is the main activity in a commons.

Commons can use standards and guidelines developed by other organizations (e.g., OKFN Open Definition, Budapest Open Access Initiative guidelines, and the Open Source Initiative definition) to inform their core definition of open content and access. Openness will be reinforced through the use of licenses that support the sharing of outcomes, such as knowledge gained by mining commons resources, research undertaken using commons resources, and software derived from commons code.

Commons will support a variety of open licenses. In their daily practice, commoners heed the requirements of these licenses and add their own content through them. Open includes promoting machine access to resources and metadata. Openness includes the right to deposit as well as to access, read, analyze, cite, quote, and mine. Where privacy is important to protect the rights of data providers or subjects, commons will make best-practice efforts to secure these data.

Demand sharing necessitates a radical rethink by stakeholders in their relationship with research assets produced by ‘their’ researchers, using ‘their’ funding, published within ‘their’ publications. The openness of commons allows the development of external services that can be more closed, proprietary, or involve ranking and selection: e.g. aggregation and indexing services, as long as they do not devalue the commons.

“In many instances IPRs [intellectual property rights] appear to be privatizing and commoditizing — “enclosing’’ — socially useful knowledge that, if widely shared, could result in more affordable and accessible medicines, scientific research, educational resources and climate technologies. In recognition of this reality, EU policy ought to empirically examine whether existing policies are sanctioning severe opportunity costs. By recognizing contemporary technological and economic realities, EU policies could unleash moves towards more affordable health systems, wider uptake of green technologies, a more open, participatory creative culture, and more responsive democratic governance” (The EU and the Commons, 2015; Accessed April 12, 2020).

Any person, organization or other entity can make scholarly work public.

As long as the criteria for open sharing are met — as determined by each commons through their governance — making a work publicly available is considered publishing a work. Additional requirements to add value for reuse (metadata, provenance, reproducibility, etc.) increase in value in a demand-sharing science culture, where outputs can be mined, mixed, and repurposed. Any person, organization or other entity (including publishing companies or entities that currently act as such, e.g. scholarly societies) will be welcomed by commons for providing services that help the publication, preservation, dissemination and assessment of scholarly work, as long as these services and the outputs they produce comply with the demand-sharing principles of the commons.

As commons content is stewarded by commoners within the commons, exclusive rights to this cannot be sold within or without the commons. Fees for additional services designed to maintain shared resource availability can be managed within the commons. Fees for access outside of the commons, and outside of the larger networked commons endeavor can be used to fund commons expenses, but cannot restrict access to content inside the commons. Operational principles for those who provide infrastructure for a global scholarly commons network are laid out in Bilder, et al, (2015).

Science commons explicitly reject the current model of publishing scholarly works which emphasizes the release of works only when they have undergone the peer review process. In a commons, a published work may be a version of a work that gets subsequently refined, similar to the way that open source software is released and then refined. Additional layers of curation, peer review and editing will be performed on works as needed for purpose. Note that these comments, discussions, annotations are themselves scholarly objects.

“Building a small ecosystem of capped returns is all well and good, but it won’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. This idea has the most potential for impact if it becomes the new norm and displaces indefinite returns significantly — maybe entirely.” P2P Wiki

“Effective institutions at all levels require continuous engagement, because they all unravel over time.” (Benkler, 2015)

“A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.” Pierre Trudeau.

“Communal values must be taught, and renewed, continuously.” (Peter Linebaugh, 2014)

Sustaining scholarly commons: There is global commitment and participation in long-term viability and preservation.

A global community is needed to actively grow and sustain science commons in the long-term. The shared-pool resources of hundreds of commons across the planet will need, and should command public funding for maintenance and growth. Each state has a stake and role in preserving and promoting the active knowledge available through commons repositories hosted in their territories, for the benefit of all science.

Commons will not flourish without the participation of commoners within the commons and also as citizens of their polities, promoting commons norms and values across societies. Commoning as a feature of scholarly work needs to be taught at all levels, practiced in everyday work, discussed and improved through reflexive innovations, and celebrated across the globe.

“An economics of abundance seek out these kinds of strategies of providing for our needs; it is not an economics that assumes that abundance exists, but one that analyzes modes of scarcity generation…, and that points out ways to counteract them” (Hoeschele, 2016).

“It seems like if we could re-frame the way we think about these problems, and find new abstractions, new places to stand and see the issues we might be able to break through at least some of those that seem intractable today. How might we recognise the unexpected places where it is possible to create abundance?” (Neylon, 2015); Accessed April 9, 2020.

All activities and outputs that take place within commons have a permanent home in these commons and are available to the public

All content and services in scholarly commons will be publicly shared. All resources are openly available and may not be removed. There is, of course, a differential built into the amount of prior learning that enables various uses for commons resources. Mostly this is a built-in feature of the complexity of the research endeavor, and the extreme complexity and emergent qualities of the current state of research in any field. A chess club may be open to all, however, the skills needed to play well with the most advanced members become available mainly through long-time learning and practice. Similarly, optimal use of scholarly commons resources very often requires years of training/learning. See also: Against Exclusion: open is open to all.

Currently, academic research is surrounded and interpenetrated by an economic logic that manufactures scarcity as a means to grow arbitrary value and improve profit margins. The academy needs to grow its own digital economy. And for this, it needs to capture the value that researchers invest into it. One part of this exchange value will come from the expansion of internet-enabled services, another from the increase of its digital resources, and a third from the contributions of scholarly talent and funding sources.

While it is tempting to try and capture more value for pooled resources inside a commons by creating a differential use license that restricts use outside of the commons, there are more effective means available for this purpose. Commons can create or participate in civic trusts, set up like land trusts are today, which hold key aspects of the property rights for commons resources, and can negotiate with other commons and with external interests for the use of these resources (See: McDonald, 2015; Accessed April 10, 2020). Cultural practices that support demand sharing within commons can also be effective in reducing behaviors such as extracting resources from the commons or seeking advantages by working with external interests.

“With ‘subtractive’ resources such as fisheries, for instance, one person’s use reduces the benefits available to another. High subtractability is usually a key characteristic of common-pool resources. Most types of knowledge have, on the other hand, traditionally been relatively nonsubtractive. In fact, the more people who share useful knowledge, the greater the common good” (Hess and Ostrom, 2009).

Demand sharing means that the use of commons resources cannot devalue these

The logic of scholarly commons starts with the notion of abundance. One mission of scientific commons is to manage a full range of science objects, without needing to reject some because of an arbitrary constraint on capacity or a responsibility to judge their value. The aim then is to maximize the usefulness and usage of these objects by supporting discoverability, mining, sharing, and reuse. Unlike natural resources (a fishery, a forest, etc.) the digital objects in scholarly communication are non-rivalrous. Their use by one member does not devalue their use by another. Overconsumption is not a concern. The optimal state for the global network of scientific commons is one that supports as much consumption of their resources as is technically possible (See: Abundance).

In any one commons, the active sharing of resources, and the added opportunities for creative conversations and “cerebrations,” produces a great variety of outcomes and records, and new generations of results that had been enabled by the commons, and that get returned to start new cycles of knowledge building and knowing. Every commons anchors deeply into the infinite game being played by its members. Each commons reaches out to other commons to expand the horizon of the infinite game of science (See: Open Science and the Infinite Game). In some ways, each commons is self-sustaining: a crucible of activity and joy that fuels itself.

Do-ocracy: “Responsibilities attach to people who do the work, rather than elected or selected officials.” P2P wiki.

There is an expectation of service by commoners to support research and scholarship in their commons

Commons will establish their own forms of do-ocracy. This is a generalizable feature of self governance for any scholarly commons. Leadership will be gathered from the edges, where new working groups will be building and expanding the collection and its services. Effective group leaders will find that their service opens up new doors for greater service (no good deed goes unpunished). A reputation for accomplishing significant work will form the basis for participation in leadership roles.

Scholarly commons build on a tradition of service; scientists have been gifting their research results to the republic of science for centuries now. The types of activities that constitute service are expected to be enlarged and their capacity for documentation enriched, e.g., participation in online conversation forums. As a general rule, individual scholars and teams will always receive more value from their commons than they contribute. This primary surplus of value is not just due to the network effects of commons (network effects), but also from the added opportunities for serendipitous interactions (Serendipity). The value proposition that each vibrant commons represents can be expressed explicitly on an individual, institutional, functional, disciplinary, national and global basis.

“Single loop organizations fix problems… Double loop organizations fix problems and fix the situations that caused the problems” (Shirky, 2011; Accessed April 12, 2020).

“[P]rofessions have specific ‘internal goods’. They include truthfulness, analytical skill, and buying into the professional’s fiduciary duty to their client in the wider context of behaving with integrity to all. To acquire such internal goods of practice — or ‘goods of excellence’, as he subsequently termed them — MacIntyre [1984] argues that one must practice at least three virtues: justice, courage and honesty.
When practising one’s profession, one can’t make up one’s own facts. And a good argument is one that would persuade the best of one’s colleagues, not just one’s own side. Thus, just as Francis Bacon proposed — sublimely — regarding the growth of science, that we cannot command nature except by obeying it, so the professional must master and obey the imperatives of their discipline to gain access to the agency it offers. This idea of engaging with an external or objective order implies justice, which is secured only by allowing correctness within the practice to trump ego or power. This, in turn, implies equal treatment for equal merit within the terms of the practice” (Gruen; Accessed April 14, 2020).

Commons become community-based value-generators for the work of their members

The way forward requires an effort that spans the entire practice of scholarship, from intellection to publication. Researchers face the task of redesigning the scholarly workflow, while they inject these new modes of doing research and publication into the broader academy. The life of a scholar is rigorous and difficult, but also includes opportunities for personal and collective fulfillment. As commons spread across the academy, these will generate local communities that do two important tasks for each member: the communities cascade collective meaning into scholarly practice at the team, and they support cultures of caring and kindness, and trustful events and friendships. They hold shared, internal virtues (goods) as binding on their members. As MacIntyre (1984) reminds us: “[T]he essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.”

Virtues and normative practices in a commons are promoted to stimulate behaviors that support the production and dissemination of the best scholarship and science. They encourage respect for the principles of these commons, and they discourage behaviors and practices that inhibit participation. They apply to all stages of and participants in the research cycle. They respect and support non-standard research outputs (such as datasets, software, methods, null-results, ideas) and para-scholarly activity (e.g. leadership, community service, peer review, and adjudication).

Researchers across the globe will have wide variety of local issues to bring to their commons. The academy today is broken in various ways that reflect cultural issues locally. Each organization and discipline faces their own version of these disfunctions. While all solutions are ultimately local, every commons creates helping practices that can be shared laterally across the planet.

“What I call software collapse is what is more commonly referred to as software rot: the fact that software stops working eventually if is not actively maintained. The rot/maintenance metaphor is not appropriate in my opinion because it blames the phenomenon on the wrong part. Software does not disintegrate with time. It stops working because the foundations on which it was built start to move. This is more like an earthquake destroying a house than like fungi or bacteria transforming food, which is why I am trying out the term collapse” (Hinsen, 2017: Accessed April 13, 2020).

“How do we ensure that the system is run “humbly”, that it recognises it doesn’t have a right to exist beyond the support it provides for the community and that it plans accordingly?” (Bilder et al, 2015).

Scholarly commons exist outside of specific technologies, funding sources, and business models

Scholarly commons accommodate, facilitate, stimulate and adapt to any developments and technologies that promote their goals, and enable their practices. Because the needs of commoners and the means to meet these will be emergent, commons must remain nimble and able to pivot. Commoners are stewards over their shared-pool resources. They treat these with the same quotient of caring that they bring to one another. Commoners are maintainers as well as innovators.

Commons can also fail. They can lose the capacity to own and steward the shared pooled resources they need; this will happen should their resources become “enclosed” by another organization (e.g., when these are sold to a for-profit concern). Or, a commons can fail to sustain their governance model and lose the necessary volunteer support and membership. When a commons fails, it is important that pooled resources remain in the civic trust, so that a new commons can be generated as needed to manage these. A single civic trust (Accessed June 12, 2020) can hold the property rights for one or many commons, each of which has access to the shared resource. This also reduces the transactional value of the commons, since the commons owns mainly the right of access (including mixing and mining, etc.), and the trust owns a portfolio of other rights. The trust guards against enclosure of the commons’ resources, a major cause of failure.

Other ideas/questions about commoning in the academy:

· A single object — say a dataset — in one open repository can be claimed as a resource by more than one commons, as long as each commons supports their own dark archive, or points to a collective dark archive, in case of data loss.

· Scholarship needs to be fearless in its infinite game play. One role of academic tenure was to protect this condition. In the face of the neoliberal market, tenure has failed in this role. Hundreds of thousands of scholars will never achieve tenure. Can the commons provide this protection?

· Someone noted that many science data objects are “uncommon” objects that require knowledge and knowhow to use and share. Scholarly commons also maintain knowledge and knowhow along with its shared resources. Commoners are maintainers too.

Moving ahead

The real question is how to rescue (or re-place) current academic institutions using commons-based societies and economics. The commons is not an alt-academy, it needs to refactor existing organizations, where possible, and spin up new ones as required. How can we help move this process forward? If commoning is the “WD40” to release science for the sclerotic hold of its 19th Century institutions (See: Is my learned society obsolete?), internet-based technology is the duct tape needed to help these hundreds and thousands of commons communities work in concert across the globe. The internet holds the future of science. Shared resource platforms, such as Zenodo <https://zenodo.org/> can operate at a global scale when needed, and support thousands of small teams as required. For commoning to gain traction in the academy, we must explore commoner-owned online platform cooperatives (Smichowski, 2016) as a generative practice for open science.

The first step is culture change: we need to unleash a more profound understanding of the circumstances of scholarly commoning by building up new open practices, informed by fierce equality (Fierce Equality) and demand sharing (Demand Sharing). These efforts will be localized and applied as needed to yank local institutions away from hierarchy, intellectual property wrongs, and the pull of the margin that preempts ethical decisions and norms.

References

Bacon, Jono. The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation. Sebastapol:OʼReilly. Available At, 2009. http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/downloads/jonobacon-theartofcommunity-1ed.pdf.

Benkler, Yochai. “The Idea of the Commons & Future of Capitalism.” Presented at the Creative Commons Global Summit Seoul, Korea, October 15, 2015, 2015. https://www.slideshare.net/cckslide/the-idea-of-the-commons-future-of-capitalism-yochai-benkler.

Bilder, Geoffrey, Jennifer Lin, and Cameron Neylon. “Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures.” Science in the Open, 2015.

Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to Practice. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2009.

Hoeschele, Wolfgang. The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability. CRC Press, 2016.

Kelty, Christopher. “Beyond Copyright and Technology: What Open Access Can Tell Us about Precarity, Authority, Innovation, and Automation in the University Today.” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2014): 203–215.

Linebaugh, Peter. Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2014.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Shirky, C. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Penguin UK, 2010.

Smaldino, Paul E, and Richard McElreath. “The Natural Selection of Bad Science.” Royal Society Open Science 3, no. 9 (2016): 160384.

Smichowski, Bruno Carballa. “Data as a Common in the Sharing Economy: A General Policy Proposal,” October 2016. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01386644.

The Congruent Scientist: Playing the infinite game builds personal wisdom

The aikidoka does not let distraction affect her kime **決め…** her focus and attention. She is congruent in her form.

“Yet notoriously the cultivation of truthfulness, justice and courage will often, the world being what it contingently is, bar us from being rich or famous or powerful. Thus although we may hope that we can not only achieve the standards of excellence and the internal goods of certain practices by possessing the virtues and become rich, famous and powerful, the virtues are always a potential stumbling block to this comfortable ambition” (MacIntyre, 1984).

“For us, activism in the academy springs from and serves the infinite game: it is action beyond the rules that calls us to take our intuitions, lived experience and observations of injustice and exclusion seriously. Academic activism aims to document, subvert and ultimately rewrite the rules of the finite games we currently live by, so that they make more sense to us as people seeking to give of our best to an endeavour (‘the university’) that we cannot help but believe in” (Harré, et al. 2017; emphasis added).

Alasdair MacIntyre’s caveat rings true when applied to finite power games in and out of the academy. It’s the same “nice guys finish last” logic that your academic advisor may have given you; “practical” advice that many in the academy have used as an alibi against sharing their data and methods openly. Open scientists know better. This logic exposes how the external goods of the neo-liberal market are crowding out the internal goods so vital to the success of science as a practice. Nicholas Gruen (Retrieved February 21, 2020) puts it this way: “Here’s the serpent in paradise. External goods are necessary, but, at the same time, in tension with internal goods. This is an ethical tension. The risk is always that the pursuit of external goods compromises the pursuit of internal goods, and thus the excellence of the practice.”

Certainly, during the transition phase to open practices of Fierce Equality and Demand Sharing, there will still be games for external goods where the few consider themselves winners and all others as losers. The hyper-competition for scarce external goods in the academy is not going to simply disappear on its own. Today, dozens of open science endeavors have articulated alternative solution pathways for distributing external goods without supporting perverse incentives (Edwards and Roy, 2017; Bartling and Friesike, 2014). However, building alternative practices through intentional culture change takes time and effort. The open, infinite game of science treasures its abundant internal goods — including internal measures of recognition and modes of compensation — above money, fame, and glory. Something to remember when you have little of the latter.

One particular internal good in the academy happens when your work and your person become congruent. The practical wisdom you learn and apply to your research, and with your teammates, you can also use in your life with friends and family.

Background on the notion of congruence

In 1961, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers compiled three decades of papers into the book On Becoming a Person. The main frame of the book describes his client-centric approach to psychotherapy, how he arrived at this and what he learned as a practitioner, many of the articles — which read very much as blogs do today (and were unpublishable in the scientific journals for this reason). He then links this frame to other human endeavors. In particular, he looks to education and personal relations in organizations.

His main therapeutic process involves how the psychoanalyst as a person, develops her own personhood by becoming more congruent (more about this in a minute) and then uses this congruence as a communication tool to open up the client to the process of becoming more congruent. The therapist is really only someone further along the same road to “becoming a person.”

The process of becoming a person, of achieving more and wider congruence, and so having fewer and fewer defenses, brings the client to a better life, with less tension and fear, better communication with everyone, and new opportunities to explore each moment fully. For Rogers, congruence happens when one’s real self (the one we all start out with — all infants are congruent — also the one we can shape with our own skills and the virtues we learn) fully resembles one’s ideal self (the one we acquire from social interactions with others).

The lack of congruence leads to the need to defend the ideal self every time the real self behaves differently, or when people respond to the real self instead of the ideal self. The real self becomes hidden and, indeed, often unknowable; which forms the reason for therapeutic intervention. The goal of congruence is also extremely well aligned with the goal of “becoming a scientist:” congruence unlocks intellectual creativity.

Creativity in science is a self-therapeutic practice

“The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy — man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities.…This tendency may be come deeply buried under layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate façades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every individual, and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed. It is this tendency which is the primary motivation for creativity as the organism forms new relationships to the environment in its endeavor most fully to be itself” (Rogers, 1961).

The ideal self represents the roles you acquire in order to play finite games in your life and career. For example, in your academic position, you are “The Scientist.” As Carse (1987) noted and Rogers might agree here, you have forgotten that you have the freedom to set aside your role. Quite the reverse: the role has become you. This is why you spend so much effort defending your ideal self/role, even (or especially) against your real self. How do you escape?

“[P]rogress in personal life and in group living is made in the same way, by releasing variation, freedom, creativity” (Rogers, 1961). The creativity you invest in the infinite game of science builds the capacity you can use to release your real self from the roles you play in finite games. You acquire the mindset of an infinite game player and become self-directed toward congruence. As Rogers notes:

“[T]he individual who is open to his experience, and self-directing, is harmonious, not chaotic, ingenious rather than random, as he orders his responses imaginatively toward the achievement of his own purposes. His creative actions are no more a chaotic accident than was Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity” (ibid).

Simon Sinek (2019) would add that your infinite game mindset is precisely what you need to succeed as a team member in 21st Century science.

Open science and an open you

How does the authenticity of doing science as an infinite game bleed over into your personal life? Can science really make you a “better person”? The skills you acquired to become a scientist, and the cultural practices of open science you are weaving into your work are tools you can use if you bring along the courage to seek change; “making courage part of your personal culture means you are always willing to keep making changes in your life until it is the life that you want and the life that you deserve. Courage in your life means you accept that there will be missteps — that constant and repeated change may be necessary, but that it is nothing to be ashamed of if it leads to a more fulfilling, positive outcome” (Dudley, 2018).

The intellectual tools of science, such as rigorous, reflexive curiosity, openness, and intellectual humility are available to the scientist for use in other circumstances. You can bring these skills home with you. The same kindness and humility you bring (one hopes) to your teaching and research can become an interactive style elsewhere.

On becoming an organization

“If things aren’t going right, the first response is: let’s make more rules, let’s set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don’t need to rely on judges using their judgment….Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with” (Barry Schwartz, 2011 TED Talk<https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_using_our_practical_wisdom/transcript>; Retrieved 02/17/2020.

In the Handbook’s section on Learning Organizations, we discovered double-loop learning/governance. Double-loop governance maps directly into congruence at the organizational level: the so-called “ideal” organization being the first loop, and the real organization being the second loop. Instead of hiding the real organization behind the idealized intentions of the founder, or top-down rules and regulations derived from an imperious CEO or provost, double-loop governance makes the real organization available to every member. Each member has the same view and purview of the rules and roles, the values and the vision of the organization, and also an obligation to make these congruent with the everyday activities of the organization.

The notion that your organization can also be a therapeutic setting where members can learn to become more congruent may seem peculiar today, where management mainly promotes rule-governed compliance. Barry Schwartz tells us to stop already with the rules and use our everyday interactions to grow social and personal virtues:

“Rules and incentives don’t tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. (Barry Schwartz, 2011 TED Talk<https://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_using_our_practical_wisdom/transcript>; Retrieved 02/17/2020.

Remember also that organizational Knowing — the stock of sharable knowledge that defines your academic institution’s main research resource — is a series of conversations between two or more people. Knowing cannot be stored, only generated anew as each conversation leverages the prior ones. Your organization’s culture and governance sets up the circumstances at work where members can (or cannot) communicate effectively to share their insights and grow creativity. Mainly what they share is a specific, collective scientific ignorance.

“This [the shared ignorance in a scientific conversation] is knowledgeable ignorance, perceptive ignorance, insightful ignorance. It leads us to frame better questions, the first step to getting better answers. It is the most important resource we scientists have, and using it correctly is the most important thing a scientist does” (Firestein, 2012). Using open science and the infinite game, you can make your organization a place where each member can become more of a person. In return they will make your organization a better place in which to get science done.

Coda

You’ve likely met one or more congruent scientists. Someone who has engaged you in conversation at a workshop or conference. You walk away thinking, “She is so open and intellectually humble, knows so much, and asks really great questions. She must be such fun to work with.” You might have also sensed a wellspring of truthfulness, justice, and courage there. A corner of your ego might wonder what she thought of you. If you were playing the infinite game with her, and not trying to win points, she probably noticed.

You may also have visited a congruent organization (or, with great luck, you’ve ended up working in one), and come away wondering how they manage to avoid all the administrative bullshit you deal with every day. How do they sustain that level of creative interactions? How come everybody felt safe enough to say those things out loud? What does one need to do to get a job there?

In the Earth sciences, there’s a virtual organization called Earth Science Information Partners (ESIPfed.org). This is a great example of a congruent organization. A few years back, they hired an independent review organization to advise them what they could do to improve. The report came back: sorry, everyone who knows you, loves how you work right now. The reviewers were apologetic about not exposing a range of problems. ESIP has been a double-loop learning organization for two decades. It shows. Here’s an introduction to their bi-yearly gatherings.

The Open Scientist Handbook offers tools for you to become more congruent and to build congruent governance practices into your own academy home.

References

Bartling, Sönke, and Sascha Friesike, eds. Opening Science: The Evolving Guide on How the Internet Is Changing Research, Collaboration and Scholarly Publishing. Heidelberg: Springer Open, 2014.

Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games. Ballantine Books, 1987.

Dudley, Drew. This Is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters. First edition. New York: Hachette Books, 2018.

Edwards, Marc A., and Siddhartha Roy. “Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition.” Environmental Engineering Science 34, no. 1 (January 2017): 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1089/ees.2016.0223.

Firestein, Stuart. Ignorance: How It Drives Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Harré, Niki, Barbara M Grant, Kirsten Locke, Sean Sturm, and others. 2017. “The University as an Infinite Game.” Australian Universities’ Review, The 59 (2): 5.

MacIntyre, Alasdair C. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

Rogers, Carl Ransom. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995.

Sinek, Simon. The Infinite Game. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.

Kindness, Culture, and Caring: The Open Science Way

Time for dignity and fairness: and the value of caring. Artwork by Kelvy Bird: https://www.kelvybird.com/

“So it’s kind of like if your house catches on fire. The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is random people apparate from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise. …I was trying to think of the right model to describe this form of random acts of kindness by geeky strangers. …You know, it’s just like the hail goes out and people are ready to help. And it turns out this model is everywhere, once you start looking for it.” Jonathan Zittrain, Ted Talk 2009 <https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness?>

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft of a bit of the Open Scientist Handbook. There are references/links to other parts of this work-in-progress that do not link here in this blog. Sorry. But you can also see what the Handbook will be offering soon. All comments are welcome! Revised from a talk at the ESIP 2019 Summer Meeting. With travel support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Arigatou!

There are lots of ways that the rational, logical, hyper-competitive, winner-take-all, zero-sum, prisoner’s dilemma, nice-guys-finish-last, single-bottom-line, annual-productivity ratchet — or add your adjective here — mindset is just wrong for sustaining the academy and bad for science. For decades now, the same neo-liberal economic schemes that have been used to reshape how governments budget their funds have also made dramatic and disturbing inroads into university budgets and governance. Open science can show how that trend is a race to the bottom for universities. What do you say, we turn around and go another way?

“I have learnt silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind.” Khalil Ghibran, Sand and Foam.

A century without kindness: the impact of external logics

The banishment of kindness as a necessary part of being an academic, — just one more feature of adopting the neoliberal marketplace logic, and another effect of hyper-masculinity in the workplace — allows academics to defer judgements about kindness:

“We want to argue, however, that although kindness is a commonplace in pedagogical encounters, easily recognisable by its presence or absence, attending to it can be subversive of neo-liberal assumptions that place value on utility and cost above other human values” (Clegg and Rowland, 2010).

The word for kindness in Latin is humanitas: kindness makes us human. “[T]he Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a leading Stoic philosopher, speaks of kindness as ‘mankind’s [sic] greatest delight’ (Phillips and Taylor 2009, 18). In Aristotle’s teachings, kindness is a component of phronesis: an entire type of “practical wisdom” that we’ve slowly devalued over the past 300 years (Juarrero, 1999) [ and you can blame Hume and Kant and all the usual suspects for this]. Phronesis combines virtue with a notion of adult comprehension: a way of knowing the right thing to do in all circumstances. It has little to do with intellection, and everything to do with broad experience and learning.

The road to a doctorate is long and difficult, and so adding another layer of learning to the process might seem short-sighted. And yet avoiding learning phronesis in your daily life is probably not any easier than practicing this, since the absence of phronesis leads to serial mistakes in moral and practical judgement, any one of which can be “career defining” in a negative sense. “Practical wisdom” is integral to “doing the right thing” while you learn to “do the thing right.” Doing the right thing often includes knowing how to exercise kindness with others.

A child can show kindness, and we welcome this. An adult (one who has learned some phronesis) can act kinder than a child, because this adult is experienced in a broader range of social circumstances and personal relationships. An adult can be — to use the Yiddish — a mensch. And a mensch can be kinder than a non-mensch or a proto-mensch. Lesson: be an open science mensch.

Kindness starts with intention

Real kindness begins with a clear intention. This adds an important aspect of self-judgement to its base. Without this aspect you cannot actually be kind, even if others might interpret what you are doing as being kind. How do you actually judge your intentions, particularly in relationships with other people and things? Something to contemplate. Also note: Clegg and Rowland (2010) remind us that kindness is not equated with leniency or “being nice.” Real kindness uses courage to articulate accurate observations and open learning moments that can be difficult and painful for both parties.

Kindness is something you learn and do

Kindness is a normative human practice in a wide range of social frames: parenting, friendship, governance, teaching, caregiving, civil interactions. Zittrain (above) reminds us that the internet was built on kindness and generosity. In nearly every human social endeavor, kindness matters. Even in highly-competitive sporting events, “sportsmanship” is highly valued, and is actually an internal normative form of kindness. Why should kindness, and critical interrogations about its role, be absent from research and management in the academy?

Like rationality, kindness is a form of practice, not an emotion. You can no more “feel” kind than you can “feel” rational. Unlike rationality, kindness necessarily involves others, their perspectives and needs. Kindness can and will also be judged by others for its qualities. Is it genuine? Is it motivated by a need to be perceived as kind? Is it effective in performing its intention? What is its intention? In the academy where intellectual judgements run wide and deep, kindness opens up another opportunity to be judged. But so does being unkind. Or it should. For decades, the lack of kindness in our research institutions and workplaces has gone unremarked. It is time to remark these.

Culture provides meaning to intentions

Again, kindness begins with intention. The same activity with different intentions can be a kind, caring conversation, or it can be a cruel interrogation. Intentions are themselves colored by culture. Culture provides a layer of shared meaning/learning that helps the individual (both the intend-er and the intend-ee) discover and interpret shared meaning as intended. You and the other person can answer the question: what did you mean?

The social world always contains this layer of culture. There is no society without it. Individuals hold this layer as a shared/learned resource. The cultural values (See: Values, freedoms and principles) you bring to your open science organization can assemble the meanings that add clear intentions to shared kindness. Just as some institutional cultures today — and inside the academy — support bullying and demeaning actions (NAS et al, 2018).

One feature of kindness is that it enables both halves of the double meaning of the term “care.” To really care about someone or something, you need to tap into genuine kindness. To care for someone or something can merely be a job. But this job is also reduced without the impulse of kindness. That is why it is time to…

Put care back in your career.

“[B]y infusing bureaucratic maintenance work with an ethic of care, we can challenge contemporary workplace attitudes surrounding “productivity” and “efficiency,” moving toward the recognition of maintenance itself as a valued contribution. We can also broaden access to systems of information, thereby supporting its generative value…” (Maintainers et al, 2019).

The Maintainers <http://themaintainers.org/> extend an ethic of care to each other and to their work: they keep everything running, instead of inventing new stuff. This ethic is born in kindness, and requires a level of humility not casually found in the academy, where intellectual heroics overshadow moral choices.

Nel Noddings, who is a “care theorist,” someone who makes “the caring relation basic in moral theory” (2003), looks to recenter care as a normative behavior in education and the academy. She also separates the care that is expected in work (for example, doing something really well, or managing the needs of a student/patient) as a conformity to a workplace ethic, from caring: human acts “done out of love and natural inclination” (Noddings, 1988). What really works — in teaching and learning, and in team dynamics for collaborative research — is not completing the task of due-diligence, but rather building a framework of mutual caring nurtured from authentic kindness.

Bringing care into this discussion has now moved us away from communities, cohorts, and institutions. Care directs us back to intentions that are articulated in culture, but which also speak to being human in a mutually responsible human environment: a phrase not usually descriptive of the academy. “[W]e are led to redefine responsibility as response-ability, the ability to respond positively to others and not just to fulfill assigned duties” (ibid).

Open science is also science done through care and kindness: science that much more resembles the model of peer production within a commons, than it does a winner-take-all corporate struggle. “[W]ithout receiving conventional, tangible payments or favors in return, peers exercise kindness, benevolence, charity and generosity” (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006). Open science demands new levels of response-abilities: based on new and expanded academic freedoms (See: Values, freedoms and principles) and internet-enabled collaborations.

Coda: There are a lot more articles and books (such as Phillips and Taylor (2009): On Kindness) about the history of kindness and care that point out how these virtues were heralded as the basis of human happiness for centuries, and only recently (last 3–400 years) have these been eclipsed by more individualistic moral models (thanks to Hobbes, Kant, etc. — the usual suspects). So… practicing open science may also be good for your happiness. Doing open science can improve your happiness, and the happiness of those around you. How about that?

References

Benkler, Yochai, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2006): 394–419.
Clegg, S., and S. Rowland. “Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 31, no. 6 (2010): 719–735.
Juarrero, Alicia. Dynamics in Action. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1999.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NAS Committee on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academia, Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and Policy and Global Affairs. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Edited by Paula A. Johnson, Sheila E. Widnall, and Frazier F. Benya. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.17226/24994.
Noddings, Nel. “An Ethic of Caring and Its Implications for Instructional Arrangements.” American Journal of Education 96, no. 2 (1988): 215–230.
— — — . Happiness and Education. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Phillips, Adam, and Barbara Taylor. On Kindness. 1st American ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

10 things every open-science culture-change agent needs to know about.

Here are the 10 things you need to know about to be an open-science culture-change agent. Pick the ones you want to challenge yourself to master.

Sharing starts everything Photo: Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

1. Open science culture starts with the logic of demand sharing:

This is the same logic used to teach science in classrooms: knowledge gains value when it is shared. The more it is shared the more it is worth; the faster it is shared the greater its impact; the wider it is shared the better the chance that someone else will improve upon it, and share this improvement back with you.

2. Intellectual humility is integral to open science:

“The humility of scientific genius is not simply culturally appropriate but results from the realization that scientific advance involves the collaboration of past and present generations” (Merton, 1973).

Here are some aspects of humility and reasons why this is a great fit with open science, and a powerful agent against bullshit prestige (Moore, et al, 2017) and narcissism (Lemaitre, 2015) in the academy. Tangney (2000) constructed a working definition of humility, one that is not simply philosophical, but also informed by social and interpersonal circumstances. This definition rejects humility as a psychological weakness, instead, humility demonstrates a range of abilities highly valuable in the conduct of science. According to Tangney, humility has five elements:

A. the ability to acknowledge mistakes and shortcomings;
B. openness to perspective and change;
C. an accurate view of the self’s strengths;
D. ability to acknowledge and experience life outside the direct consciousness of the self; and,
E. the ability to appreciate the worth of all things.

As an open scientist (or just someone who wants to do science really well), you might consider how to develop all of these capabilities. You acknowledge your mistakes in order to learn new facts; you broaden your perspectives on your topic to achieve a wider level of understanding; you evaluate your own skills to discover where you must improve your methods; you journey into the unknowns in your field to stretch the envelope of our knowledge; and you reserve judgement on the work of others long enough to fully grasp their meanings. You also give others more attention and respect. This does not mean you respect yourself any less. You just learn to step around your ego to see others and their work as more valuable. Recent research has found that intellectually humble individuals may acquire new knowledge better than others (Krumrei-Mancuso, et al, 2019). Also note: “only humility can navigate complexity” (Fred Kofman <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80vYx7ufzZI&feature=relmfu> Retrieved September 14, 2019).

Humility helps you learn. Humility enables your research. You are a scientist: you have the freedom to be humble about it. It’s not modesty. Nobody is asking you to be modest. Think of it more as “hum-ability”.

In Aikido, humility becomes hum-ability. Open science is the same.

3. Intentional kindness is the platform for open science culture:

“The power of happiness, kindness and humility in the competitive academic environment is underrated, but I firmly believe that they are a force for change for the good of scientific practice. In my opinion, widespread application of these principles could vastly improve the quality of life of scientists and university professors worldwide” (Maestre 2018).

Kindness in open science (end elsewhere) begins with intention. Intentions are themselves colored by culture. Culture provides a layer of shared meaning/learning that helps us discover and interpret and map shared meaning as intended. The same conversation with different intentions can be a kind, caring dialogue, or it can be a cruel interrogation. The cultural values (See: Values, freedoms and principles) you bring to your open science organization can assemble the meanings that add clear intentions to acts of kindness, and to the generosity that all science requires. Just as some institutional cultures today — and inside the academy — support bullying and demeaning actions (NAS et al, 2018). Note: kindness does not mean weakness.

Shared kindness is a platform that lifts open science up to new potentials for sharing knowledge. In the academy, kindness is a radical form of courage. Everyone here is smart. If you want to truly distinguish yourself: be kind.

Kindness flows from a concern for the whole science community and the planet, not just your own lab or students. The best teachers are already kind in their classrooms. Bring that kindness to your research too. Don’t be that one asshole who makes others stop sharing. Kindness is not optional.

4. Open science means really open:

Open science may have started by opening up paywalled publication workflows, but it only succeeds when open extends back through the whole research process. Open is a manner of doing research that seeks to reveal as much of itself as it can or might, to promote shared knowing and reproducibility. Open is a transparently governed and democratic workplace in your organization. Open is open across the planet.

5. Open-science culture change starts with you:

Now is the time for you to lead your own open-science cultural change project. When you look around, you might be dismayed by the (dead) weight of organizational culture in your workplace. You can start small, and you can recruit others. The goal is to get back to the way science is meant to be pursued: to play the infinite game against intractable unknowns, to squeeze new knowledge from observations and information.

Remember first that leadership means humble conversations (Deep Dive: Humble Conversations ), fear-free interactions (Deep Dive: The Fear-Free Organization), democratic participation (Deep Dive: Democracy). You provide the compass (an informed open-science perspective), not a map. You and your colleagues are on a new learning curve toward a workplace where the only fear you find is the joyful thrill of playing with nature and data to unlock new insights. Open science needs you to find this kind of leadership inside and bring it to the academy.

6. Open science culture is learned:

You learn culture just like you do science, only you started early on, and without knowing this. That’s what this handbook is for. Disney and the Boy Scouts have been conscious, intentional, culture-learning organizations for decades. So too has the US Navy (for example), and your elementary school. This Handbook and hundreds of web resources are available help you discover more about open science and how to be an open scientist.

Culture is not just some subliminal vibe that you soaked up somehow (although you did a lot of culture learning really early on, and it seems like it was just soaked up). You are an adult. You are now responsible for your cultural behaviors. You can bring your focused intention and behavioral skilling to the goal of becoming more open each day. You succeed as an open scientist (and, in some fashion, as a person) by being more open today than you were yesterday.

7. Open science culture is an on-going conversation:

Make it a point to talk and question others about open science culture. The more people who talk the talk, walk the walk, and share what they value most, the better science will become. As John Wilbanks once said: “the opposite of ‘open’ is not shut. The opposite to open is broken.” Share your open science practices and stories. Keep talking with one another as you build common agreements.

8. Open science culture must be transmitted:

Teach your students to be open scientists. Talk to you children about how science really works in the open. Talk to their science teachers about the benefits of open science. Be an open-science mom or dad. Don’t have kids? Make sure the freshmen in your class know the difference between old-science and open science. The next generation of open scientists will need to assemble their own cultures. You can give them a head start.

9. Open science means open to all:

Not just to the “Republic of Science,” to the long-tail and beyond. Publication works when anyone on the planet can find your knowledge and share theirs with you. Do not worry; technology will help provide filters to keep you from drowning in information you do not need. Technology is one side of being open. Culture is the other side. The entire planet gets into the act at some point.

Future open scientists. Photo: Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.

10. Open science culture will become your culture too:

You get to grow your own personal virtues aligned with the shared virtues you use in your work. You get to add passion (and nuance too) to how you realize your own cultural flavors within your various social/workplace groups. Open science wants as much of you as you care to bring to it. You can take and carry away as much open science culture as works for you. You can own your unique style of open science. Grow it. Show it off. Add new thoughts to the mix. Make a ruckus with it.

References

Krumrei-Mancuso, Elizabeth J., Megan C. Haggard, Jordan P. LaBouff, and Wade C. Rowatt. “Links between Intellectual Humility and Acquiring Knowledge.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, February 14, 2019, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359.
Lemaitre, Bruno. An Essay on Science and Narcissism: How Do High-Ego Personalities Drive Research in Life Sciences? Bruno Lemaitre, 2015.
Maestre, Fernando T. “Seven Steps towards Health and Happiness in the Lab.” Nature, November 23, 2018, d41586–018–07514–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-07514-7.
Merton, R.K. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago press, 1973.
Moore, S., C. Neylon, M.P. Eve, D.P. O’Donnell, and D Pattinson. “‘Excellence R Us’: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence.” Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 16105.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NAS Committee on the Impacts of Sexual Harassment in Academia, Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and Policy and Global Affairs. Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Edited by Paula A. Johnson, Sheila E. Widnall, and Frazier F. Benya. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.17226/24994.
Tangney, June Price. “Humility: Theoretical Perspectives, Empirical Findings and Directions for Future Research.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 19, no. 1 (2000): 70–82.

Celebrating Changes and Values

“[Y]ou get what you celebrate in a free culture,” Dean Kamen (attrib. 2009).
“…intelligent failures, as the term implies, must be celebrated so as to encourage more of them” (Edmonson 2019).
“…frustrations can be vented; accomplishments and people spontaneously celebrated. In these moments, more is at play than simple information exchange” (Laloux, 2014).

In much of the literature on organizational culture, the advice is to “celebrate” this or that. The term is used as its meaning suggests: to acknowledge or affirm through some shared event. Acknowledgement and affirmation require generosity. In the academy, the term has been mostly used adjectivally: “She is a celebrated biologist;” or “Her celebrated work on X explores…” Here, however, celebrations are active and verbal. The important thing here are the three aspects that are happening at the same time in any real celebration.

“You need to not only understand your values, but celebrate them…” (Bacon, 2009).

Celebrations in your workspace entail three important aspects:

1. There is a shared social activity. This activity is meant to honor or recognize the value of something/someone. Everyone can participate as they wish. Time and resources may be spent to hold these events. Regular and irregular events break the routine of the workplace. Within the event any number of values and accomplishments can be mentioned, or the event can itself celebrate the value of being a community. Alternately, celebrations may be as simple as someone making a positive comment about someone or some activity, and everyone else nodding and smiling. Occasions where time and resources are spent are investments by the organization to its employee community.
2. This social activity requires a shared positive emotional tone from all who participate. You do not need to be the most enthusiastic person in the room, but you are expected to actually want to celebrate. Lending your sincere emotional support to the activity is a gift you give to the community. This shared emotional space also opens up the social frame for interpersonal conversations that can build trust, and improve teamwork. Even most introverts can find something to smile about.
3. This activity is meant to be shared within a community. Going out dancing alone in a night club may be your way of “celebrating life,” but here you really belong. You are meant to be here with all these other people. And that belonging is also shared. In fact, these occasions for celebrating are times when “inclusion” ups its game to signal actual belonging. This part of celebrate requires that you’ve spent some time creating community in your workplace. This usually means that you also share “community” as a value. Every time you celebrate something/someone you are also celebrating your community.

Celebrations demonstrate generosity

Celebrating starts with a clear intention: generosity. Lacking this, no event can be called a celebration, even though it may look like one (balloons, songs, whatever). Celebrations are good barometers for the health of your institutional culture. On any one day, you might not be feeling generous. That is fine, you can still participate. You may have had the painful experience of an office party where nobody is feeling generous; where everyone knows that the event is for show only; and where there is no shift in the shared emotional mood that would allow for free conversation. In a culture turned toxic, you can no longer actually celebrate; genuine generosity will seem out of place and time.

When celebrations fail, it’s time to reexamine your culture. This means that celebrating your values (and each other) is also a litmus test on how well your governance is working to help you build a community — another reason to celebrate regularly. Putting up your values on a sign by the front door is not the same as celebrating these. This goes for your academic department or lab as much as it does for a Silicon Valley start-up.

References

Bacon, Jono. The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation. Sebastapol: OʼReilly. 2009 Available At: <http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/downloads/jonobacon-theartofcommunity-1ed.pdf>.
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2019.
Laloux, Frederic. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the next Stage in Human Consciousness. Nelson Parker, 2014.

Demand Sharing: a Real Sharing Economy for the Academy

In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another:
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

Share what’s important to you. Demand what you need. Photo Credit: Hartwig HDK on Flickr, CC By-ND 2.0

Demand sharing means you can ask for everything you need to do your science… with one proviso…

PLEASE NOTE: This is a draft of a bit of the Open Scientist Handbook. There are references/links to other parts of this work-in-progress that do not link here in this blog. Sorry. But you can also see what the Handbook will be offering soon.

We’ve all heard about the “sharing economy,” where we can gain new streams of income or convenience by simply sharing excess capacity (that spare room, the car ride, an electric scooter, etc.). And we’ve been told since childhood that sharing things we no longer need can help those with greater needs. Most of us feel we have a good idea about what it means to “share.” But then most of us are also mistaken, and here’s why.

Anthropologists who look at the ethnographies (and who do their own) of hunter-gatherer groups, and who sometimes also look at modern attempts to create sharing economies (e.g., Uber, Airbnb, etc.), tell us several things about sharing that most of us may find new and different from what we expected (Widlok, 2016; Suzman, 2018 <https://aeon.co/essays/why-inequality-bothers-people-more-than-poverty> Retrieved May 6, 2019). These ideas about sharing, synthesized from the study of human groups that have been successfully building their own lives for tens of thousands of years, say to us that we have “sharing” almost completely wrong.

For example:

• Real sharing is not charity. Charity is an artifact of the marketplace (and of personal wealth) and the logics of artificial scarcity.

• Sharing something you own that you are not using (like a spare room or space in your car) in exchange for cash is just another form of market transaction.

• Giving away things that you don’t need or no longer want is not a good example of sharing. This is an edge case.

Demand Sharing: share what is most important to you. Get what you need in return

In this handbook, we use the phrase “demand sharing” to designate a culturally advanced form of sharing, a type of cultural behavior that has been in widespread use of the majority of the human population for tens of thousands of years, and only recently eclipsed by marketplace logics in the past two to three hundred years. “Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture” (Harari, 2014).

Society uses demand sharing to fund its needs

A rather good (perhaps unexpected) example of demand sharing in modern society is having your representative government demand a tax that everybody pays, which then, for example, supports your state’s public colleges and universities (and pays your salary). That’s right; taxation is how a society demands of itself those resources it needs to prosper (Widlok, 2016).

Another example is sharing within a household, where family members can grab a snack from the refrigerator without much bother or need to justify or account for their choices. In the case of the academy, the “refrigerator” is the rapidly expanding corpus of digital research objects, and the family is fellow scientists who stock this with the outputs of their work, and who can then dive in and grab what they need for their own research. Note: this is a never-empty refrigerator, as these digital objects are not used up by their taking. Note again: they are anti-rivalrous: they gain value when they are shared. This is something every open scientist needs to remember.

“[L]earning is taken as much as given” (Godin, 2019; <https://seths.blog/2019/05/college-confusion/> Retrieved May 6, 2019).

Learning is demand sharing for knowing

Teaching and learning already require demand sharing. As an open scientist you’ve probably taught in a variety of classroom situations. Your students asked questions to extend their learning. Your best students (bless them) outright demanded to be taught. They marched into libraries (buildings, or on-line) and demanded the resources they need. They came to your office hours and demanded answers to their quandaries.

This means that nearly every scientist is well versed on how to participate in a demand-sharing economy. First, the state demands that its citizens fund the university, supporting teachers and learning. Then the student shows up and demands to be taught. We all did this as students. It’s not obscure, it’s how we learn.

Imagine a professor giving a lecture who stops in the middle and says, “This next part is really interesting; if you want to learn it, go to my app on your phone and deposit $10.” This should sound bizarre to you (if it doesn’t, then the neo-liberal university is your real home).

The for-profit textbook industry is very close to this same idea, particularly when a professor assigns their own textbook.

In part it sounds strange because the professor’s salary is already paid, hopefully through taxes. But mainly, it sounds wrong, as professors (who were once students) are completely happy for their students to learn. These learning moments in the classroom are seen as socially important and personally rewarding. When a student asks you a question, you do your best to help them learn something new.

In the hunter-gatherer culture, when a child comes to your fire and asks for some bit of meat from your catch, you always give it to them. Like food at a hunter-gatherer fire, information in a college is something that can be demanded. Demand sharing in education is a type of cultural economy where the norms and rules — the times and places, the manner of asking, the desire to teach and the value of learning — are well-known, without being written down. Students know they cannot demand the answers to a quiz in advance. What is sometimes forgotten is the need for and role of kindness in these interactions; more about that a bit later in the handbook (Deep Dive: Kindness).

Got a PhD? You know how to demand what you need

This means that you already know how to do demand sharing. Let’s look how demand sharing differs with what we just described as poor examples of “sharing.”

• You don’t give your classes as a form of charity (even though you may consider your own salary inadequate). You are a professional. Teaching is important. Your students have legitimate demands on your knowledge and your kindness. Passing on knowledge is why you teach.

• You also don’t teach your students content that you find worthless to you or loan them books that you are no longer satisfied with, unless these books are instructive in other ways. You share what is really important to your professional life: the best knowledge you’ve acquired.

• You expect students (at least, grad students) to demand from you what they need to learn and grow as scientists.

Demand sharing means sharing what is important to your research

This is the proviso we mentioned above. The same demand-sharing logic that collects the taxes that pay your salary, and enables your students to learn, also enables the academy to manage its knowledge resources for the benefit of all scientists, and the planet through the internet. Until today, a scientist might legitimately point out the huge amount of process-friction that would overly complicate sharing her data or workflows. A lot of the work of open-science advocates in the last two decades has been focused on reducing that friction through web-based platforms and services. Much of the remaining friction is cultural; linked back to institutional practices that do not reward or actively punish open resource sharing.

In an open-science, demand-sharing academic culture, sharing as much of your research as early as possible is a virtue strong enough to be a norm. Share what matters most to you: your methods, your findings (even null fundings), and your data. Share your best ideas openly, not simply those ideas that you have no interest in pursuing and every interest in having someone else pursue (See also: Idea Farming). Share your knowing by listening and adding to the conversation.

Open science requires generosity with a simple promise: each scientist will get more than they give. That’s the bargain the academy makes with you when you join and actively participate in the open-science academic society.

Of course the whole push to reboot the academy is based on the premise that this bargain has been bent and broken in many places.

This bargain is bolstered by the network effects of academy organizations. Demand sharing optimizes this bargain across academic networks and clubs (Redaction, 2016; Retrieved June 1, 2019).

Sharing imbeds your work into the community of science as a gift, a form of offering that also signals your membership. Sharing includes reviewing and acknowledging the work of your peers (See also: Perils of peer review). The open-science community creates its internal authority through relentless self-critique.

This authority works through a special soft of reciprocity and a level field of mutual status. As Polanyi (1962) noted, “[O]nce the novice has reached the grade of an independent scientist, there is no longer any superior above him. His submission to scientific opinion is entailed now in his joining a chain of mutual appreciations, within which he is called upon to bear his equal share of responsibility for the authority to which he submits.” This reciprocal authority of “mutual appreciations”, based on openly shared and critiqued knowledge is the basis for all applications of authority and leadership in an open-science academy (See also: Leadership and sharing).

The offerings you provide to the “republic of science” (Polanyi, ibid) lend you the cultural capital to demand the resources you need for your work from the abundance of open-access resources, and the knowing of others in your field. These, in turn, offer up their research for your use. As Hyde (2009) notes, the “constant and long-term exchanges between many people may have no ultimate ‘economic’ benefit, but through them society emerges where there was none before”; your contributions help create the academy society.

Amplified by the internet’s global reach, these exchanges expand and accelerate the process of science. You share the most important ideas you have, even at the risk of being scooped, because getting the most important work done now — whether you do this or someone else does (and attributes you with the idea) — moves science forward. You share your research results, all of them, knowing you will be critiqued by your peers, as you will also critique theirs.

“The self-image of humans who are embedded in sharing relations is not one of homo faber who creates his or her world out of nothing and without anyone else. Rather it is an image of what I have called homo sumens … who takes into use what is available through the company of others and that can be claimed from them” (Widlok, 2016).

Academic clubs: collectives for research collaboration

Demand sharing is a dense cultural practice, with its own behavioral expectations. When you share, you signal your desire to be included in the community. What you must learn, then, are the guidelines for demanding resources. “[T]he problem is not one of deciding what to give to whom but rather what to demand of whom. The onus is on the potential receiver to make his or her claim acceptable and the rules for appropriateness are not about acceptable giving but acceptable demanding” (Widlok, ibid; emphasis added).

The cultural shift to demand sharing will create a social basis for new science collectives, for “clubs” that share internally as though the club were a single, social organism. These formations are not entirely new. R&D Think-tanks have been funded for this purpose, and the NSF in the US spends a billion dollars a year funding academic workshops to assemble temporary collectives to solve common problems. “Club goods” are non-rivalrous inside the club, but not necessarily without shared costs (Hartley, et al, 2019). Thomas and Brown (2011) describe these as well, “Collectives are made up of people who generally share values and beliefs about the world and their place in it, who value participation over belonging, and who engage in a set of shared practices. Thus collectives are plural and multiple. They also both form and disappear regularly around different ideas, events, or moments.” Collectives enable collaboration across the internet, inform team-building, and open up the cultural situations for shared knowing.

The cultural practices of demand sharing will be emergent in the academy as open resources — including access to and discoverability of collaborators — become increasingly available in the next decade. This Handbook will help you to kickstart your own collectives, and forge demand-sharing cultural norms that suit your situation; see also Building new collectives.

Together with “fierce equality,” demand sharing as a cultural norm can help realize an actual sharing economy for the academy, separated from the arbitrary scarcity of the neo-liberal marketplace; a gift economy grounded in mutual appreciation and reciprocity. The particular practices of demand sharing will need to grow inside thousands of institutions across the globe. A goal of this Handbook is to give you the resources you need to build demand-sharing logics inside your academy homes. You can be a demand-sharing culture change agent by sharing your research objects and your research questions and problems; by listening more and adding your knowledge when asked. Demand answers from others; learn together. It’s science, not alchemy. You are not alone.

References

Harari, Y.N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Random House, 2014.

Hartley, John, Jason Potts, Lucy Montgomery, Ellie Rennie, and Cameron Neylon. “Do We Need to Move from Communication Technology to User Community? A New Economic Model of the Journal as a Club.” Learned Publishing 32, no. 1 (January 2019): 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1228.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage, 2009.

Polanyi, M. “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory.” Minerva 1 (1962): 54–73.

Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Vol. 219. CreateSpace Lexington, KY, 2011.

Widlok, T. Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing. Routledge, 2016.

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Culture repair

On becoming a scientist: escape from bullshit

Ways forward

Learning from Silicon Valley

Institutional guilt

Toxic cultural practices will murder your academic dreams

Your organization can govern its way out of any toxic culture

References

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Publishing with open badges for open practices

Learned Societies as badge engines

Badges for culture building

References:

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Open science needs to admit that no scientist is a lone giant in their field

There’s a badge for that

References

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Reciprocity and gift economies unpacked

Start with reciprocity

Understanding gift economies

Demand sharing is different

Demand sharing is the economy for the commons

Investing in, provisioning from, and sustaining scholarly commons in the infinite game

References

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Starting points toward commoning in open science

Scholarly commons are…

Scholarly commoners are…

Scholarly commoning is…

Commons start with people: a community of commoners.

A text with some history

These commons are open to all participants who accept their principles

Science commons welcome and encourage participants of all backgrounds

Equality also for objects in the pooled resource collection

Science commons have no intrinsic hierarchies, rankings, or reward systems

A commons is open by default, with a culture of demand sharing

Any person, organization or other entity can make scholarly work public.

Sustaining scholarly commons: There is global commitment and participation in long-term viability and preservation.

All activities and outputs that take place within commons have a permanent home in these commons and are available to the public

Demand sharing means that the use of commons resources cannot devalue these

There is an expectation of service by commoners to support research and scholarship in their commons

Commons become community-based value-generators for the work of their members

Scholarly commons exist outside of specific technologies, funding sources, and business models

Other ideas/questions about commoning in the academy:

Moving ahead

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Background on the notion of congruence

Creativity in science is a self-therapeutic practice

Open science and an open you

On becoming an organization

Coda

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A century without kindness: the impact of external logics

Kindness starts with intention

Kindness is something you learn and do

Culture provides meaning to intentions

Put care back in your career.

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Here are the 10 things you need to know about to be an open-science culture-change agent. Pick the ones you want to challenge yourself to master.

1. Open science culture starts with the logic of demand sharing:

2. Intellectual humility is integral to open science:

3. Intentional kindness is the platform for open science culture:

4. Open science means really open:

5. Open-science culture change starts with you:

6. Open science culture is learned:

7. Open science culture is an on-going conversation:

8. Open science culture must be transmitted:

9. Open science means open to all:

10. Open science culture will become your culture too:

References