It is difficult to consider open scholarship in the early 2020s without referencing the elephant in the room: the shared global context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This strange and challenging time illuminated many cracks in global-scale infrastructure and nation-level societal priorities, and it also shone a light on the critical importance of open access to research and data. Commenting on this situation in a December 2020 article for The Conversation, Ginny Barbour, Director of Open Access Australasia, argues that “making it the default that research is open so it can be built on is a crucial step to ensure we can address [...] problems collaboratively.” But, vital as such a call is, perhaps it is not quite as easy as simply deciding to make open the default in research, or in scholarship more broadly. As Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray write in the introduction to their recent collection Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access (2020), open access can be “intensely messy” (10). Further, they suggest, “open access is perceived through a set of contested institutional histories, argued over various theoretical terrains in the present, and imagined via diverse potentialities for the future” (Eve and Gray 2020, 10). Open social scholarship shares a similarly complex layering of histories, theories, and possibilities—increasingly apparent as open social scholarship grows and evolves across disciplinary and geographic divides.

Within this complex terrain of urgent calls for open access, convoluted academic histories, and multiple contexts of open scholarship and social knowledge creation, how do we put theory and values into action? This is one of the key questions that the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership grapples with through their exploration and development of the concept of open social scholarship. An action-oriented approach, open social scholarship is “academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways” (INKE Partnership n.d.). Open social scholarship builds on the already complex and layered concepts of open access, open scholarship, and social knowledge creation. Rather than accepting open access as the endgame for scholarly communication, open social scholarship asks what is possible and necessary beyond straightforward access to research output. Such an endeavour aims to shift the default from publishing research for relatively insular research communities (and sometimes into the ether) to fostering intellectual engagement and broad, inclusive communities around areas of shared interest.

Similarly, an open social scholarship approach recognizes that faculty members are far from the only stakeholders and participants in knowledge creation. Rather, we understand scholarly communication as a social ecosystem comprising intersecting communities of researchers, librarians and information professionals, publishers, and broader publics, as well as an epistemological ecosystem comprising multiple knowledges and knowledge-holders (Burke 2000, 2012). These ecosystems are global in scale and founded on infrastructure that includes not only technological components but also policy, information, and human and non-human actors.

The need for secure, robust digital research infrastructure has become especially pressing in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking a crisis-response approach, for instance, Invest in Open Infrastructure’s report from the Future of Open Scholarship Project calls for community-led and -developed infrastructure that can be adapted quickly to meet the needs of researchers, publics, and other stakeholders in the face of future global crises (Goudarzi et al. 2021). Committing to robust and sustainable systems is thus key for open social scholarship in the long term, in terms of technological capacity and stable funding. Human capacity is also essential in the form of expertise in infrastructure development and maintenance as well as the management, curation, and preservation of data across the disciplines (Bryant, Lavoie, and Malpas 2017; Cooper et al. 2020). Moreover, a cultural shift is needed in order for this kind of work to be recognized and valued as essential to the research enterprise and as scholarship in its own right.

Such a cultural shift recognizes the interconnected and interdependent nature of scholarly communication writ large. Alongside this shift is increasing momentum behind efforts to recognize multiple knowledges and ways of knowing. In addition, the research community is increasingly addressing long overdue efforts to acknowledge and end extractive and colonial research practices and infrastructures (Chan et al. 2020; Gaudry 2011). As one example among many, Indigenous communities and GLAM professionals are collaborating to revise harmful language in library and archives metadata to more accurately describe those communities and their cultures in their own terms (see, for example, Blair and Wong 2017; Farnel et al. 2018).

Policy is an important driver of open social scholarship in local and international contexts. Canada’s Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy, released in 2021, codifies best practices for managing research data—including making it as open as possible and creating robust metadata—that enables data sharing and reuse, collaboration, and other forms of open social scholarship (Government of Canada 2021). Plan S was launched in 2018 as a European initiative but is now global in scale, with members from Africa, the Middle East, and the US; the first Canadian funder—the Fonds de recherche du Québec—joined in June 2021 (Gouvernement du Québec 2021). In 2021, UNESCO released its Recommendation on Open Science, providing a global framework intended to guide policy and practice from the individual to the international level (UNESCO 2021).

Running through all of these examples—and through open social scholarship as a whole—is the idea that collaboration is essential for the vitality and sustenance of research. Through collaboration, individuals and institutions can harness economies of scale for the benefit of all. For instance, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which represents 29 university libraries across Canada, collaborated with the European open science organization OpenAIRE to develop Canada Explore. Canada Explore is a portal for discovering and accessing Canadian research. In addition to achieving economies of scale, collaboration is essential for addressing challenges that are too formidable and complex to solve alone. As discussed above, the COVID-19 pandemic is the most salient example of collaborative open scholarship: one that has revealed its power and its unrealized potential for solving current and future health crises as well as existential challenges such as climate change.

In December 2021, participants came together for two days at an online event called Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice to discuss these topics and more. Featured panelists, lightning talk presenters, session chairs, and audience members discussed and debated many key open social scholarship issues and trends. This event built on previous years’ meetings and discussions of both the INKE Partnership and the Canadian–Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS).¹ Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice was the third annual gathering of the CAPOS group and the ninth annual winter gathering of the INKE Partnership.² It brought together over 150 students, librarians, researchers, and administrators from around the world to discuss open social scholarship, with specific focus on priorities for researchers and partners; community concerns; pragmatic approaches; publication; and considerations specific to the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Event presenters hailed from across Australia and Canada, as well as from Europe and the United States, and the event had registered attendees from all of these nations as well as Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. This participant group from around the world brought in a multiplicity of perspectives and experiences on the form, function, and facilitation of open social scholarship. This special issue encapsulates some of the key discussions from Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice, with the hope that these conversations will continue beyond this publication too.

The INKE Partnership is a North American-based research network with the goal of fostering open social scholarship, as referenced above. For over a decade, the INKE Partnership has brought together experts and leaders with the aim of realizing open, inclusive, and publicly engaged scholarship that serves both academic interests and society at large. This group includes researchers, partners, librarians, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and research staff from across Canada and Australia. Coordinated by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI)³ at the University of Victoria, the INKE Partnership works to address challenges in scholarly communication by providing broad access to research, community training, public engagement, and policy recommendations. This public-facing work helps to make open social scholarship in Canada both viable and usable.

CAPOS is a collaboration between Canadian and Australian researchers, policy makers, libraries, computing organizations, research groups, and postsecondary institutions to advance the understanding of, and resolve crucial issues in, the production, distribution, and engagement of scholarship that is open and digital. This partnership draws upon both countries’ positive track records of participating in and influencing the international consideration of open social scholarship issues. CAPOS works towards implementing elements of open scholarship policy and practice from the international sphere in national, regional, and local contexts—work that is possible because of the complementarity of governmental and academic institutional structures and legal frameworks in Canada and Australia. In sum, CAPOS aims to make open scholarship more efficient and more impactful for the specific national contexts of Canada and Australia, while feeding back into and participating in larger, global conversations around the creation, sharing, and preservation of research outputs.

INKE Partnership and CAPOS goals and objectives run through this special issue. Deb Verhoeven casts a critical eye on the very concept of openness in academia and calls on the community to approach open scholarship questions conscientiously in “Scholarship in a Clopen World.” In “Open, Collaborative Commons: Web3, Blockchain, and Next Steps for the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons,” Talya Jesperson and Graham Jensen consider how emerging technologies like blockchain might interact with in-development digital research infrastructure, and John Maxwell thinks through the role of community-oriented peer review in “The Care-ful Reviewer: Peer Review as if People Mattered.” Zoltan Kacsuk, Magnus Pfeffer, Simone Schroff, and Martin Roth provide a glimpse into applying open standards to a digital humanities project in “Harmonizing Open Licenses among Online Databases of Enthusiast Communities: Challenges Encountered in the Legal Integration of Databases in the Japanese Visual Media Graph Project.” Finally, in “From Pamphlet Wars to PDFs: The Shadow History of Research Publishing by Organizations,” Amanda Lawrence digs into the development of scholarly publishing.

Conference recordings

In addition, conference presenters shared recordings of their lightning talks prior to the event proper. Readers can access many of these recordings here to develop a fuller understanding of community discussions at Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice:

• John Maxwell: “The Care-ful Reviewer: Peer Review as if People Mattered”

• Graham Jensen and Talya Jesperson: “New Pastures: Expanding the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons”

• Paul Arthur (Edith Cowan U), Nikos Koutras (Edith Cowan U), and Lydia Hearn (Edith Cowan U): “Open Digital Scholarship for Creative Industries: A Review through the Lens of Copyright Governance”

• Jon Saklofske: “Open Social Pedagogy: Modelling Foundational OSS Values in the University Classroom”

• Magnus Pfeffer, Zoltan Kacsuk, Simone Schroff, and Martin Roth: “Harmonizing Open Licenses among Online Databases of Enthusiast Communities”

• Kelsey Dufresne and Micah Vandegrift: “The Digital, the Multimodal, & the Fermentable: Public Knowledge Sharing with Fermentology”

• Anke Finger and Virgina Kuhn: “Shaping the Digital Dissertation: Knowledge Production in the Arts and Humanities”

• Luis Meneses: “Maintaining Open Digital Scholarship Infrastructures in the Arts and Humanities”

• Graham Jensen: “Designing Digital Commons to Support Open Social Scholarship”

• Alyssa Arbuckle, Graham Jensen, Caroline Winter, and Randa El Khatib: “Surveying the Open Social Scholarship Critical Landscape: Connection, Training, Community, Policy”

This special issue draws together diverse contributions that reflect a range of topics connected to open social scholarship. The INKE Partnership and CAPOS communities, comprising various members across differing professional and disciplinary lines, are taking a close look at their work and asking themselves how they might undertake it in more open and more social ways—how they might put open social scholarship into practice.