Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @[email protected] // [email protected]
INKE: Creative Approaches to Open Social Scholarship // 17 June 2024
Note: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be here with you today, and I’m looking forward to getting to hear some of what’s going on across the INKE collaboration. The tl;dr on my talk today is that the future of knowledge creation depends heavily on the openness of the infrastructures that support our work. I know that for a lot of people, the word "infrastructure" triggers a yawn reflex -- like, oh great, a super technical talk, do I really want to hear a lot about this?
“Infrastructural systems are famously boring because the best possible outcome is nothing happening, or at least nothing unexpected or untoward.”
—Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works
Note: If that's your reaction, you're not alone. As Deb Chachra points out in her brilliant book, How Infrastructure Works, “Infrastructural systems are famously boring because the best possible outcome is nothing happening, or at least nothing unexpected or untoward.” The best thing that infrastructure can do is remain invisible and just work. But as Chachra also argues, the shape of our entire culture is dependent on our infrastructure, and where inequities are part of those systems’ engineering, they constrain the ways that culture can evolve.
- foster social and epistemic justice
- empower communities of practice
- enable community-led decision making
Note: Infrastructure matters, and the educational and communications infrastructures on which we build, develop, design, and publish our work have deep implications for our abilities - to foster social and epistemic justice in higher education, research, and other aspects of knowledge creation and sharing - to empower communities of practice and their concerns in the development and dissemination of knowledge - to enable trustworthy governance and decision-making that is led by the communities that our publications and platforms are intended to serve But all of this requires commitment to open, public infrastructures, in order to ensure that the work we do in higher education can become actually equitable.
Note: What do I mean by "actually equitable," and how might what I'm describing intersect with the aims of the open access and open education movements? We've heard a lot over the last twenty-plus years, for instance, about the ways that open access should transform scholarly communication. If our work could be read more openly by anyone, it's been said, it might both have more impact on the world at large and create a more equitable knowledge environment. And it's of course true that open access in its many present flavors has done a lot to make more research available to be read online. But the movement toward open access began as a means of attempting to break the stranglehold that a few extractive corporate publishers have established over the research and publishing process -- and it hasn't succeeded. The last decade in particular has revealed all of the resilience with which capital responds to challenges, as those corporate publishers have in fact become more profitable than ever. Not only have they figured out how to exploit article processing charges in order to make some work published in their journals openly available while continuing to charge libraries for subscriptions to the journals as a whole, but they've also developed whole new business plans like the so-called "read and publish" agreements that keep many institutions tied to them, and they've developed new platforms and infrastructures like discovery engines and research information management systems that serve to increase corporate lock-in over the work produced on campus.
budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/
Note: The open access movement was founded more than 20 years ago in order to make it possible -- as the original Budapest statement said -- to "share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge." By the time the Budapest group reconvened in 2022 to celebrate its 20th anniversary, it had become all too obvious that the dominant open access publishing mechanisms that had emerged in the interim had not had the desired impact, leading the BOAI 20 statement to argue that "OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research"
“We became increasingly clear that OA is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, above all, to the equity, quality, usability, and sustainability of research. We must assess the growth of OA against the gains and losses for these further ends. We must pick strategies to grow OA that are consistent with these further ends and bring us steadily closer to their realization.”
—BOAI 20
Note: (READ SLIDE.) To put it a bit more plainly, thanks to the resilience of the corporations that control the infrastructure of scholarly communication, open access in its dominant forms today has if anything reduced equity, by attaching high fees to the formats and platforms that allow publications to circulate most widely. Scholars whose fields, institutions, or nations do not have ready access to grant funding or other means of subsidizing publishing fees thus get silenced, closed out of participation in sharing their learning.
budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai20/
Note: It’s for this reason that the 20th anniversary Budapest recommendations led with a call to host open access research on open infrastructure, recognizing that the control of the infrastructure by profit-seeking entities cements inequities – and this is true even where the large corporate publishers purport to create opportunities for the disadvantaged by offering fee waivers and discounts on their publishing charges. Those discounts only serve to normalize a model in which it is considered correct for those who produce knowledge pay corporations to host and circulate it.
Note: I want to be super clear about what I mean by that. The way things are currently done in the dominant forms of open access publishing today involves author-side fees. And that idea -- "the way things are done" -- is the heart of any culture. To call it culture is not to diminish its significance at all. As Peter Drucker has long been quoted as saying,
Note: "culture eats strategy for breakfast" in the corporate universe -- which is to say that the normalized, unspoken assumptions about the ways things are done will take precedence over all but the best-laid alternative plans, and because of that real strategic change often demands deep cultural transformation as a prerequisite.
Note: Take, as an example, the case of "fair use," which as we all know (at least in the US context) is not a legally defined status with respect to the use of copyrighted materials, but rather a fuzzy affirmative defense posture built out of several highly subjective factors, requiring the defendant to prove their innocence in a courtroom that presumes their guilt. Fair use is a small and eternally at risk exception within a culture that is built on the presumption of the correctness of owner control, in other words. And as Susan Bielstein argues in Permissions: A Survival Guide, every time we ask permission to use an image or a quotation in a way that ought to be defensible under fair use, we weaken that exception, and we normalize the dominance of ownership, giving credence to corporate claims that we ought to be asking for permission at all times because that's the way things are done.
Note: Open access fee waivers are similarly a precarious exception within a larger culture of corporate control of the mechanisms of publishing. That exception presumes that you should pay to make use of those mechanisms, even if in your particular case they might bend the rules. Every time we accept a corporate publisher's discount or fee waiver, or make use of a "read and publish" deal, or otherwise use public funds to cover the increasingly ridiculous sums charged in order to circulate the products of research, we help strengthen the argument that it's perfectly normal for corporations to control the flow of knowledge and to profit from doing so.
Note: All of which is to make the faintly obvious point that ownership matters, and especially when it comes to infrastructure.
mindthegap.pubpub.org/pub/gei072ab/release/2
Note: As the authors of the report entitled "Mind the Gap: A Landscape Analysis of Open Source Publishing Tools and Platforms" note, whatever progress might have been made in OA publishing was mitigated by the fact that the publishers still control the publishing infrastructure. They still own the journals, for instance, which are one key bit of the infrastructure on which we publish, and unless the ownership of the journal changes -- thus enabling a real transformation in the cultural expectations surrounding how the journal operates -- the infrastructure remains out of our control. All that's changed is the means through which we pay to access it.
Note: That’s all been a lot about publishing, but more or less everything I’ve said about corporate publishers and their control of infrastructure is doubly true of the ed tech landscape. The systems we use to "manage" (already a nervous-making word) our courses and student learning are too often technologies of extraction. They hoover up resources from our institutions and content from us and our students, and while their stated goals – creating the best possible environments for digital learning – may be admirable, their prime motive is by and large delivering value for shareholders. As a result, education is not the field they are serving, but rather the resource they are strip mining. Developing open-source, academy-owned alternatives to these platforms is a serious challenge, but one that demands to be met.
Note: So what alternatives do we have? Well, in the realm of publishing, we could move our journals to nonprofit publishers, but it's of course important to note that the distinction between "corporate" and "nonprofit" is a vast oversimplification. There are corporations that are actually good actors in scholarly communication space, and there are nonprofits that are really, really not. What we might need to be paying more attention to is less business model per se than
Note: alignment at the level of our basic values and goals: ensuring that our concerns about equity, about inclusiveness, about the public good are matched by those of the partners we choose to work with. University presses typically pass this test, though not universally -- there are a few such presses that operate a lot more like the big corporate publishers than we might want. But even though most university presses have yet figured out the economics that will allow them to make the work they publish fully open, most of them do center access and equity as their purpose rather than increasing shareholder value. And besides university presses, there are lots of other nonprofit, values-aligned publishing platforms and services out there that we might consider moving our publications to – not to mention our energy and our time.
Note: These include what have been called "platinum" or "diamond" open-access publishers such as the Open Library of the Humanities, or Open Book Publishers, just to name two. What these projects have in common is their work to develop a new business model for publishing that neither involves restricting access to published texts to individuals or libraries that can pay for them, nor restricting the ability to publish to those with the ability to cover publishing costs. They instead ask those institutions that can afford to contribute to the ongoing support of their platform to do so, thus keeping access to the platform open to everyone. They appeal to those institutions' desires for values-alignment. These projects and platforms and publishing workflows rely on public and institutional investment in order to make both publishing and reading freely available to all, and that are for that reason they remain accountable to the publics that they serve.
Note: These platforms are, in other words, community-led, rather than investor-led. Not only is their purpose aligned with that of the community they serve (rather than focusing on increasing shareholder value through increasing profit margins), but they are governed by the communities they serve. And this, as Deb Chachra argues, is the key to developing the sustainable, equitable infrastructures we need for the future:
“Only community-led networks, whether publicly owned or non-profit cooperatives, even have the potential to incorporate broad-based accountability, long-term thinking, and an ethos of meeting needs.”
—Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works
Note: (READ SLIDE) And this, more than anything, is what both scholarly communication and educational technology need today: broad-based accountability to scholars and fields and institutions rather than shareholders; long-term thinking and an ethos of meeting our needs rather than those of investors. Hence the call in the 20th anniversary Budapest statement for hosting open access research on open infrastructure: infrastructure that is led by us, and accountable to us.
Note: And this is the fundamental orientation and driving purpose of my own project. Knowledge Commons, which originated from a desire to build new avenues for more open, more public, more universally accessible scholarly communication for everyone. In 2013, with support from the Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association launched an internally-focused social network, MLA Commons, designed to foster direct communication and collaboration amongst its members. In 2016, we extended that model, again with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, to embrace other fields across the humanities, establishing Humanities Commons as a platform for interdisciplinary communication among scholars and practitioners around the world. We’ve recently rebranded as Knowledge Commons, in order to better represent our disciplinary inclusivity, but the key elements remain the same. Account creation is open to any interested user regardless of institutional affiliation, professional status, or organizational membership, and accounts are and will remain free of charge.
Note: Our goal is to provide a non-extractive, community-led and transparently governed alternative to commercial platforms. Beyond that, however, we want to encourage our users to rethink the purposes and the dynamics of knowledge creation and dissemination altogether, in ways that might allow for the development of new, open, collective, equitable processes of creating and sharing our work that recenter agency with those who are actually doing the work.
hcommons.org
Note: Knowledge Commons is a multi-functional network supporting collaboration and communication among more than 40,000 researchers and practitioners across the humanities and around the world. The Commons brings together a large-scale WordPress-based publishing network with the social-networking capabilities made available by the BuddyPress plugin, allowing users to create rich profiles detailing their work, to participate in a wide range of group discussions, and to build individual or group websites that can serve as portfolios, journals, networked projects, and more.
hcommons.org/deposits/item/mla:579
Note: Additionally, the Commons includes a library-grade repository with a WP frontend, allowing members to upload their work, to share that work openly with the broader Commons network, and to have the digital object identifiers and other metadata attached to it that render a it permanently addressable part of the larger scholarly communication ecosystem.
commons.msu.edu
Note: In 2020, Humanities Commons moved from the MLA to a new fiscal host, Michigan State University, and began work developing the first institutional node on the network, MSU Commons. Over the next two years, we received two significant investments of multi-year support from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation, allowing us to staff up, to remediate our technical debt, and to develop a forward-looking roadmap toward a more sustainable future.
sustaining.hcommons.org
Note: Humanities Commons is built by and for scholars. It's a values-enacted project, meaning that, among other things, (1) we have put in place a participatory governance structure that enables both individual users and our institutional sustaining members to have a voice in the project's future, (2) we have developed network policies that emphasize inclusion and openness, and (3) we are committed to transparency in our finances, and most importantly to remaining not-for-profit in perpetuity.
hcommons.social
Note: We are also working to build and sustain the kinds of new platforms and services that will allow for rich conversations among members of our community and between that community and the rest of the world. A year and a half ago, seeing the handwriting on the wall for the platform formerly known as Twitter (and frankly having suffered through quite a number of unhappy years there before the beginning of the end), we launched hcommons.social, a Hometown-flavored Mastodon instance, in the hopes of providing a collegial, community-oriented space for informal communication among scholars and practitioners everywhere. We currently have over 2000 users who have created accounts on our instance in order to connect with users throughout the Fediverse, and we support those users through a strong moderation policy and code of conduct. We also work to ensure that new policies and processes are discussed with that community before they’re implemented.
Note: This kind of openness matters enormously, not just to ensure that we’re living up to the values that we’ve established for our projects, but to ensure that there’s a worthwhile future for them. Cory Doctorow has written extensively of late about what he has famously called the
pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Note: “enshittification” of the internet, which stems directly from the funneling of what he here calls “surpluses,” but might also be described as attention, or energy, or value, being sucked out of the community and into the pockets of shareholders. As he notes, the forces of enshittification are everywhere on the internet today, with Twitter among the most obvious.
pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
Note: More recently, however, he’s written about why he’s sticking with Mastodon rather than jumping onto any of the big corporate services like Threads or Blue Sky, and says that it’s because he fundamentally does not trust them. He goes on to note the time and energy and brilliance and creativity that so many of us poured into Twitter, only to have it come to the ignominious end that it seems to be nearing: “The only thing worse,” he says, “than having wasted all that time and energy would be to have wasted it — and learned nothing.”
Note: The problem with walled gardens is partly about their ownership, but largely about their governance. It’s not just that the owners of any particular proprietary network might turn out to be racist, fascist megalomaniacs – it’s that we have no control if and when they do. Choosing open platforms means that we as users have a say in the future of the plots of ground we choose to develop. This is especially true for the kinds of work, like knowledge production, that is intended to have a public benefit. It’s incumbent on us to ensure that those gardens aren't walled, that they don't just have a gate that management may one day decide to unlock to let select folks in or out. Rather, our gardens must be open from the start, open to connect and cultivate in the ways that we as a community decide.
As Doctorow notes, Mastodon is far from perfect, and as much as I love our own instance, hcommons.social is far from perfect. But we're doing our best to ensure that we're running it in the open.
Note: And operating in the open, both for the Commons and for hcommons.social, means for us that we are accountable to our users and responsible for safeguarding the openness of their work. Together, those two ideals undergird our commitment to provide alternatives to the many platforms that purport to make scholarly work more accessible but in fact serve as mechanisms of corporate data capture, extracting value from creators and institutions for private rather than public gain.
Note: But. We aren’t a perfect alternative. And this is where we need to dig down into the dirty underside of digital infrastructure. As Deb Chachra points out,
“infrastructure hides itself. ‘Infra’ literally means ‘below’ – these systems are not just metaphorically but often literally invisible, in our walls and floors, under our roads, in a restricted area, or surrounded by a level of inattention that the science fiction author Douglas Adams satirically described as a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem field.’”
—Deb Chachra, How Infrastructure Works
Note: (READ SLIDE) If we are going to mitigate the inequities created by and sustained through our infrastructures, we have to get busy unearthing those systems and finding ways to build new ones. And so:
Note: We need to take a hard look at the fact that the infrastructure that Humanities Commons is built upon is AWS, or Amazon Web Services. As you might guess from the name, AWS is part of the Greater Jeff Bezos Empire, and every dollar that we spend to host with them helps to keep that empire running. And run it does!
statista.com/statistics/233725/development-of-amazon-web-services-revenue/
Note: Amazon’s revenue derived from AWS passed 80 billion-with-a-b dollars in 2022.
trends.builtwith.com/hosting/Amazon
Note: and as of August 2023, AWS hosted 42 percent of the top 100,000 websites, and 25 percent of the top one million – ironically enough including BuiltWith, the site from which these data are made available.
Note: Why has Amazon become so powerful a force in web hosting and cloud computing? Largely because they provide not just servers but a powerful and wide-ranging suite of tools that help folks like us not just make our platform available but also help keep it stable and secure and enable it to scale with enormous flexibility. AWS provides connected equipment and tools that would be more than a full-time job for someone to maintain in-house, and it enables redundancy and global reach at speed, and it’s relatively easy to manage. So… it works for us, just as it works for 42,000 of the top 100,000 websites across the internet. But I’m not happy about it. It’s not just that I hate feeding more money into the Bezos empire every month, but that I know for certain that our values and Bezos’s do not align. And every so often I have to stop and ask myself how much good it does for us to build pathways of escape from the extractive clutches of Elsevier and Springer-Nature, only to have those pathways deliver us all into the gaping maw of Amazon?
Notes: AWS has a stranglehold on web-based platforms of our size, as we’re too big for a server kept under the desk, too complicated for a smaller hosting service, and too small for our own data center. And if you don’t want to deal with the risks and costs involved in owning and operating the metal yourself, there just aren’t many alternatives, and certainly not many good ones.
Note: My institution, Michigan State University, like most institutions its size, operates both a large-scale data center through our central IT unit and a high-performance computing center under the aegis of the office of research and innovation. The latter can’t really help us, as it’s focused pretty exclusively on computational uses and not at all on service hosting. And the former comes with a suite of restrictions and regulations in terms of access and security –
cnn.com/2023/08/29/politics/university-of-michigan-cyber-incident-offline
Note: – pretty understandably so, given recent attacks and exploits such as the one that caused our neighbor to the east to disconnect the entire campus from the internet on the first day of classes last fall – but nevertheless restrictions that make it impossible for us to be flexible enough with our work.
Note: And, in fact, central IT strongly encourages projects like ours to make use of cloud computing, given the complexity of our needs and the risk-averseness of the campus. And we have our pick! We can use AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or Google Cloud Services.
Note: I just can’t help but think that it’s a Bad Thing for academic and nonprofit services like ours – services that are working to be open, and public, and values aligned with our communities – to be dependent upon Silicon Valley megacorps for our very presence. We need alternatives. Real alternatives. And I fear that we’re going to have to invent them, because as the example of open access publishing demonstrates, waiting to see what commercial providers come up with is certain to increase our lock-in, and increase the level of resources they extract from our campuses.
Note: So what might it look like if our infrastructure for the future of knowledge production and dissemination was community-led all the way down? What might enable the Commons to leave AWS behind and instead contribute our resources to supporting a truly shared, openly governed, not-for-profit cloud service?
Note: Could such a service be collaborative, with all member research institutions and organizations paying into a shared, professionally staffed data center?
silicon.co.uk/cloud/why-data-centre-collaboration-is-key-to-success-for-uk-research-165462
Note: King’s College London and Jisc think so – they established the first collaborative research data center in the world nine years ago, precisely in order to help UK institutions achieve economies of scale, to increase energy efficiency, and to reduce costs. Of course, it’s a lot easier to get all the UK institutions of higher education on board with such a centralized initiative, partly because there are fewer of them and partly because they are all centrally funded.
access-ci.org
Note: The NSF funded ACCESS-CI (which stands for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support) project points in this direction, but the process of getting access (ha ha) to this infrastructure for a project like ours isn’t 100% clear, and it’s also not clear how durable and sustainable this program is. Real shared cyberinfrastructure will require a high degree of institutional collaboration to be viable.
internet2.edu
Note: So what if an organization like Internet2, for instance, instead of focusing on networking and protocols, and instead of offering to connect member institutions with corporate cloud services, instead provided a real alternative – one that was not just developed for the academic community but that would be governed by that community? What if each member institution or organization agreed to contribute its existing infrastructure, along with its annual maintenance budget, to a shared, distributed, community-owned cloud computing center? Could excess capacity then be offered at reasonable prices to other nonprofit institutions or organizations or projects like mine, in a way that might entice them away from the Silicon Valley megacorps? Would our institutions, our libraries, our publishers, and our many other web-based projects find themselves with better control over their futures?
- foster social and epistemic justice
- empower communities of practice
- enable community-led decision making
Note: None of this will be easy, and a lot of the questions I’ve just asked fall – at least for the moment – into the realm of the pipe dream. But if we were to be willing to press forward with them, we might find ourselves in a world in which the scholarly communication infrastructures on which we build, develop, design, and publish our work can help us foster rather than hinder social and epistemic justice, can empower communities of practice by centering their needs and their work to meet them, and can enable trustworthy community governance and decision-making in support of truly open, public, shared infrastructures for the future of knowledge production.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick // @[email protected] // [email protected]
Note: Many thanks.