CFP: Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice

Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice, sponsored by the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, announces a call for proposals for its virtual conference:

The last 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic have 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 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.” 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.” Open social scholarship shares a similarly complex layering of histories, theories, and possibilities. This becomes more true as open social scholarship grows and evolves across disciplinary and geographic divides.

Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice seeks to highlight open social scholarship activities, infrastructure, research, dissemination, and policies. The INKE Partnership has described open social scholarship as creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. At Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice we will consider how to model open social scholarship practices and behaviour, as well as pursue the following guiding themes:

• Community: How do we best foster humanities and social sciences research, development, community building, and engagement through online, omnipresent, and open community spaces?
• Training: How can we adapt existing training opportunities, and develop opportunities in emerging areas, to meet academic, partner, and public needs for open scholarship training?
• Connection: How can humanities and social sciences researchers collaborate more closely with the general public? What are the best ways to bring the public into our work, as well as for bringing our work to the public?
• Policy: How do we ensure that research on pressing open scholarship topics is accessible to a diverse public, including those who develop organizational or national policy?

We invite you to register for this event to join the conversation and mobilize collaboration in and around digital scholarship, with specific focus on:

• community building and mobilization
• shared initiatives and activities
• digital scholarly production
• (open) access partnership
• knowledge sharing and preservation
• alternative academic publishing practices
• epistemic injustice
• infrastructure
• social knowledge creation
• stakeholder roles and activities
• collaboration
• open technologies and skills
• social media
• public humanities
• knowledge equity

We invite proposals for lightning papers that address these and other issues pertinent to research in the area, as well as proposals for relevant project demonstrations. Proposals should contain a title, an abstract (of approximately 250 words, plus list of works cited), and the names, affiliations, and website URLs of presenters. Longer papers for lightning talks will be solicited after proposal acceptance for circulation in advance of the gathering. Please send proposals on or before October 7 via bit.ly/OSSPractice.

This action-oriented program is geared toward leaders and learners from all fields and arenas, including academic and non-academic researchers, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, librarians and archivists, publishers, members of scholarly and professional associations and consortia, open source practitioners and developers, industry liaisons, community groups, and other stakeholders. Building on previous INKE-hosted events in Whistler and Victoria (2014-20), the 2019 CAPOS conference, and our combined, online INKE-CAPOS conference (December 2020), we hope to simultaneously formalize connections across fields and open up different ways of thinking about the pragmatics and possibilities of digital scholarship.

Putting Open Social Scholarship into Practice events include:

• Featured panel: Priorities in Open Scholarship: Researchers, chaired by Clare Appavoo (Canadian Research Knowledge Network)
• Featured panel: Priorities in Open Scholarship: Partners in Research, chaired by Laura Estill (St. Francis Xavier U)
• Lightning talks, where authors present 4-5 minute versions of longer papers or reports circulated prior to the gathering, followed by a brief discussion (papers may be conceptual, theoretical, application-oriented, and more)
• Next Steps conversation, to articulate in a structured setting what we will do together in the future

This program is organized by Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle, John Maxwell, Rachel Hendery, and Tully Barnett, on behalf of our international Advisory Board and Group.

The conference will be held virtually December 8-9, 2021 Canadian timezones / December 9-10, 2021 Australian timezones.

Proposals are due October 7, 2021 via bit.ly/OSSPractice.