Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship

Researchers, educators, policymakers, and other education stakeholders hope and anticipate that openness and open scholarship will generate positive outcomes for education and scholarship. Given the emerging nature of open practices, educators and scholars are finding themselves in a position in which they can shape and/or be shaped by openness. The intention of this paper is (a) to identify the assumptions of the open scholarship movement and (b) to highlight challenges associated with the movement’s aspirations of broadening access to education and knowledge. Through a critique of technology use in education, an understanding of educational technology narratives and their unfulfilled potential, and an appreciation of the negotiated implementation of technology use, we hope that this paper helps spark a conversation for a more critical, equitable, and effective future for education and open scholarship.

scholarship. In this paper, we take an inclusive approach to open scholarship and consider it to take three major forms: (1)  In our previous work, we have discussed networked participatory scholarship, which is the third component of open scholarship and refers to scholars' uses of online social networks to share, critique, improve, validate, and enhance their scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012). We are taking an inclusive approach to open scholarship because we believe that this is reflective of current scholarly practice. All three manifestations noted above are instances of open scholarship, but they are enacted or made visible in different forms.
Within our frame of understanding, open scholarship is a set of phenomena and practices surrounding scholars' uses of digital and networked technologies underpinned by certain grounding assumptions regarding openness and democratization of knowledge creation and dissemination.
Next, we discuss what open scholarship has come to look like and by laying out some of the core, shared assumptions of these manifestations, we will provide the groundwork for a discussion related to limitations, problems, or unaddressed issues within the open scholarship movement.

What Does Open Scholarship Currently Look Like?
Discussions of openness gained traction after Friedman (2005) argued that digital technologies and open sourcing of software had helped to connect knowledge centers across the globe, thereby "flattening" the world and helping to create an even playing field between nations, groups, and individuals in a variety of ways (e.g., economics, research, etc.). More recently, Bonk (2009) built upon this idea and argued that digital technologies are specifically acting to democratize the education process. He argues that "anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime" and believes that this shift in the educational milieu offers a "new hope for educating citizens of this planet" (pp. 7-8). Similarly, proponents of the open scholarship movement have argued that by participating with emerging technologies, scholars can help to democratize knowledge production and dissemination via public online venues such as blogs and social networking sites. For example, Kumashiro et al. (2005) suggested that "technological changes are going to flood how we currently think about, do, and represent research" (p. 276), Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes (2009) posited that "participatory internet technologies… have the potential to change the way academics engage in scholarship" (p. 252), and Garnett and Ecclesfield (2011) argued that social media could empower scholars to "co-create" knowledge through networks. 169 underlying assumptions and characteristics that they share.

Open Access Journals and Institutional Repositories
As increasing numbers of print media are being replaced by digital equivalents and as issues of copyright infringement and illegal sharing become more common, scholars have begun questioning the traditional publication process and sharing their work more freely through online venues. Open access (OA) publishing has grown rapidly over the last fifteen years (Laakso et al., 2011), and OA journals have quickly arisen as • an option for scholars to publish their work so that anyone with an Internet connection can access scholarly work without facing traditional financial, legal, or technical barriers; • a means for limiting potentially abusive publisher behaviors; and • a way of returning control of scholarly work to the authors (c.f. Furlough, 2010;Wiley & Green, 2012).
Researchers have also found open access to be financially prudent for universities and institutions interested in starting a journal (Getz, 2005;Houghton & Sheehan, 2006) and have found that OA journals may produce a greater impact (in terms of readership and citations) than non-open access (NOA) journals (Brody & Harnad, 2004;Evans, 2008;Evans & Reimer, 2009;Eysenbach, 2006;Getz, 2005;Kurtz & Brody, 2006;Lawrence, 2001;Lewis, 2006;Norris et al., 2008). Further, researchers have found that some OA journals can attain a high level of impact within just a few years of launch and that OA journal articles are twice as likely to be cited as their NOA peers (Brody & Harnad, 2004;Kurtz & Brody, 2006).
Though a causal relationship between a journal's impact and its OA status alone is not supported by research findings (Craig et al, 2007;Davis, 2006;Davis & Fromerth, 2007;Gargouri et al., 2010;Henneken et al., 2006;Moed, 2006) and "OA will not make an unuseable (hence unciteable) paper more used and cited" (Gargouri et al., 2010, p. 18), it becomes clear that "wherever there are subscription-based constraints on accessibility, providing OA will increase the usage and citation of the more useable and citeable papers" (Gargouri et al., 2010, p. 18). As a result, Getz (2005, p.17) anticipates that such increased usage may lead to scholarship being "of wider influence in our society and across the planet," forecasting that "[open scholarship] researchers are likely to be more productive and students will learn more by using open scholarship" and that "within ten years, open journals are likely to dominate scholarly communication." Empirical evidence from Hajjem, Harnad, and Gingras (2005) supports this argument, as these authors found that 1.3 million NOA papers in ten disciplines that were self-archived between 1992 and 2003 have had more citations than papers that were not self-archived.
In addition to OA publications, many scholars have found benefit in sharing their data and manuscripts via institutional or national repositories in hopes of improving research and development (Houghton et al., 2009;Lynch, 2003) and making tax-funded research (often  (Ipsos, 2011). Higher education faculty have also adopted SNS in growing numbers. Moran, Seaman, and Tinti-Kane (2011), for instance, found that amongst nearly two thousand higher education faculty surveyed, well over 90% were at least aware of the major SNS and over 50% of all surveyed visited Facebook in the previous month, with over 40% posting something to the SNS in that time.
Use of these digital spaces may reflect an interest in having debate platforms for scholars who seek to live as public intellectuals, recording and sharing logs of research, or offering spaces around which critical discussions of the scholarly enterprise can occur (Kirkup, 2010;Walker, 2006). By maintaining a web presence, scholars may express their opinions, solicit feedback, reflect, share information pertaining to their professional practice, network with colleagues, reach multiple audiences, and cultivate their identity as scholars (Veletsianos, 2012;Kjellberg, 2010;Martindale & Wiley, 2005;Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004).
While scholars have also considered the pedagogical value of SNS within the classroom (Veletsianos & Navarrete, 2012b; Bull et al., 2008;Greenhow & Robelia, 2009a, 2009bMazer et al., 2007;Mazer et al., 2009;Munoz & Towner, 2009), in a survey conducted by Moran et al. (2011), it was found that 45% of higher education respondents use Facebook for professional, non-classroom purposes. Such nonclassroom uses of SNS may reflect an interest in online social grooming or using online tools as "a means to improve one's reputation and status as well as access to resources and social and practical solidarity" (Tufekci, 2008, p. 546) and are indicative of a larger cultural movement toward online culture building and connection such that, for many scholars, it may now be "hard to think of a life offline" (Beer, 2008, p. 521).
Nevertheless, the tendency to use SNS in organized professional contexts appears to be lim- access to high quality digital educational material" (Caswell, et al., 2008)  released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others" (Atkins, Seely Brown, & Hammond, 2007, p. 4). The OER movement has gained worldwide attention as a wide variety of governmental, institutional, and philanthropic organizations have adopted OER policies and have supported OER development (Hoosen, 2012), and it is believed that such practices have the potential to provide "individuals who might otherwise never have the opportunity to experience post-secondary learning a free and open chance to participate" (Wiley & Green, 2012, p. 88). Though still in its infancy, the OER movement has exhibited some positive outcomes (Wiley, 2010) though not necessarily a "discernable impact" (Wiley, Hilton, Ellington, & Hall, 2012 In these courses, primary activities emphasize connected learning through active aggregation of information, "remixing" aggregated information through building relations to earlier experiences, repurposing information by generating digital artifacts, and sharing (Kop & Fournier, 2010). The major difference between MOOCs and OER is that the former are intended to serve as online learning environments that support learners in the edu-cational process (e.g., providing feedback, completing assignments, sharing information, etc.), rather than merely making content available to them. As Fini (2009) explains, "open online courses may be considered to be a special type of OER, which solves the problem of the lack of interaction that is typical of most OER initiatives," and "the real potential of an OOC [open online course] is to be found in the emergence of learning networks among participants in a many-to-many relationship, rather than the traditional one-to-many model of interactions between a teacher and his or her students" (p. Finally, open scholarship is seen as a practical and effective means for achieving scholarly aims that are socially valuable. Such aims might range from ideological values (as mentioned above) to a variety of others including reduced cost of delivery, improved efficiency, greater accuracy, and so forth. For instance, one argument in favor of OA journals is that "the cost savings alone are likely to be sufficient to pay for open access journal publishing or self-archiving, independent of any possible increase in returns to R&D that might arise from enhanced access" (Houghton et al., 2009, p. XIX). Similar arguments have been made about improved research efficiency in sharing data sets (Trinidad et al., 2010), increasing the reach of universities via MOOCs (Carson & Schmidt, 2012), and using SNS for research purposes (Greenhow, 2009 it takes time for these tools to be evaluated, adopted, and appropriated into wide practice (Veletsianos, 2010). Finally, Zaugg, West, Tateishi, and Randall (2011, p. 32)  include "Web 2.0 technology as user-generated and hence emancipatory, or of learning analytics as allegedly leading to efficient, personalised teaching and learning, or of technology as implicitly progressive" (Hall, 2011, ¶14). Selwyn (2011b) even charges that, as a field, we need to be more negative to be taken more seriously. We believe that it is through (a) critiques of technology use in education, (b) an understanding of educational technology narratives and their unfulfilled potential, and (c) an appreciation of the complex and negotiated implementation of technology use 'on the ground' that our field will become a site of evaluative, rather than optimistic, discourse about the relationship between technology, education, and scholarship. In the words of Hall (2011, ¶11), "in order to understand our present position, and to develop alternatives that matter, we need stories and metaphors and critiques of where we are."

Researcher Positionality
Prior to explaining the challenges facing openness and open scholarship, it is important to clarify our position with respect to these issues so that the reader better understands our frame of reference and the validity of our arguments. Both authors are actively involved in researching emerging technologies (e.g., social media), technology-enhanced scholarship, and emerging forms of learning and participation. In addition, we both believe that various degrees of openness are worthwhile for scholars and educators, and we practice openness in our own work through our own blogs, our participation in social media, our sharing of 175 corporate interests. Finally, we also believe that the relationship between technology and practice is negotiated in that technology shapes practice and practice shapes the way technology is used. This belief provides part of the impetus for writing this paper as we believe that technologies shape the ways we enact openness while at the same time our beliefs, understanding, and actions pertaining to openness will shape how we use technology.

Challenges of Openness and Open Scholarship
In the preceding sections, we highlighted some core assumptions of the open scholarship movement. While we believe that open scholarship tackles deficiencies, injustices, and problems of the status quo, it is imperative to clarify its pitfalls and challenges so that educators, researchers, and administrators can consider and address them. We discuss these issues in detail below in the context of each assumption. Table 1 summarizes these challenges with respect to each assumption.  termining who profits from such practices and who is excluded from them so as to combat both under-use by some (e.g., those lacking entry to or knowledge of useful networks) and over-use or exploitation by those with the wealth, power, and prestige necessary to effectively strip mine sources (c.f. Chander & Sunder, 2004). While solutions to these problems may not be simple, forward-thinking approaches to proactive prevention with regard to the protection of scholarly freedom, and the upholding of these early-adopted ideals, are superior to post facto reparation.
To illustrate further, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were originally designed as moral imperatives and alternatives to traditional higher education, as attempts to offer free education that was co-created with learners (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010).
In this formulation, MOOCs were flexible enough to offer self-directed learners the ability to define for themselves the types of outcomes they desired, while at the same time offering opportunities for communal learning (Rodriguez, 2012 Many contemporary MOOCs can be more appropriately described as commodified education, rather than the type of open education initiatives suggested by their acronym. A clear example of this commoditization can be found in the rapid adoption of business-oriented models of distance education. While the intention of distance education enthusiasts and scholars from the inception of the field was to devise approaches to provide learning opportunities to individuals who could not otherwise physically attend educational institutions, such as learners who live in remote geographical areas (Davis, 2000), distance education is increasingly characterized as a product to be packaged and reused for efficient delivery to massive numbers of students (c.f. Noble, 2002;Wilson, Parrish, & Veletsianos, 2008).
While Coursera, Udacity, and EdX allow access to educational opportunities, this argument conceals the fact that (a) the type of education offered by these initiatives appears to be reserved for students who are intrinsically motivated, self-directed, and have the necessary prior knowledge to succeed; and (b) education has goals broader than effectiveness and efficiency, namely engagement and social justice (Wilson, Parrish, & Veletsianos, 2008). In To participate productively in scholarly networks online, scholars not only need to understand the participatory nature of the Web, they also need to develop the social and digital literacies and skills essential for effective engagement with such networks. Unequal access to technology and/or lack of digital literacies is referred to as the participation gap (c.f.  Jenkins et al., 2006). In the context of open scholarship, the participation gap may refer to those scholars and learners who participate in networked spaces and are able to take advantage of digital literacies to advance their learning, teaching, research, and career (e.g., learning new teaching approaches, bringing their research to the attention of broad audiences, organizing colleagues to tackle important professional issues) vis-à-vis those who have had no exposure to participatory cultures or who do not have the essential literacies to engage in such activities online. Rheingold (2010) is convinced that individuals need literacies affording them to decode and encode digital information. These literacies relate to attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption (Rheingold). Without access to these literacies, contemporary scholars and learners will be ineffective participants in online spaces. Subscribing, following, and commenting on other scholars' blogs, for example, will at some point become too much of a time commitment. Nevertheless, scholars who are literate in digital matters are capable of devising ways to manage participation. For instance, the use of web services to alert scholars of newly published information relating to their research interests (e.g., through the use of Google Alerts) allows scholars to effortlessly remain current in developments in their field.
These issues introduce a need to redesign university curricula preparing future scholars to account for the changing nature of scholarship. In such curricula, we envision the teach-  179 relatively flat and non-hierarchical manners (e.g., all connections are "friends," or all connections are "followers"), and such a stance may be incompatible with how relationships are structured in educational settings and other contexts offline (Veletsianos & Kimmons, in press of open access journals, accessibility and use of OER, participation in scholarly networks, and use of social media by diverse audiences will arise and should be a matter of concern for participants when considering who profits from, and can efficiently and practically use, their collaborative or shared work. As a simple example of this issue, while we can advocate that individuals should publish in OA journals or that they should use social media in their professional practice, we must recognize that if we engage professionally with these practices ourselves, our advocacy comes from a position of power and we might be better positioned to benefit from these practices than others whose individual circumstances prevent them from fully adopting such practices.

Conclusion
In this paper, we identified a number of assumptions of the open scholarship movement and highlighted challenges associated with the aspirations of broadening access to education and knowledge through openness. We noted that even though openness and open scholarship have generated positive outcomes for those who enact and participate in such practices, individuals in the field infrequently critique their assumptions. The assumptions we identified suggest that open scholarship • is rooted in an ethical pursuit of democratization, human rights, equality, and justice; • highlights the importance of digital participation; • is treated as co-evolutionary with technological advances; • is considered as an approach capable of achieving socially valuable scholarly aims.
Challenges facing open scholarship are associated with each one of these assumptions. Examples include the misappropriation of open scholarship; the need for scholars developing social and digital literacies; the consideration that technology is neither neutral, nor a single solution to problems facing education and scholarship; and the consideration that open scholarship introduces new dilemmas relating to power, fairness, and equity.
In the introduction of our paper, we noted that Friedman (2005) argued that digital technologies and open source initiatives have contributed to the development of an even playing field between nations, groups, and individuals. Friedman however also noted that there is no guarantee that technologies will be used for the benefit of humanity, as he argues that the disempowered live in a flat world, but "don't have the tools or the skills or the infrastructure to participate in any meaningful or sustained way" (p. 382). Open scholarship has the potential to enhance scholarly endeavors, but it requires paradigmatic shifts in the ways that we think about education, knowledge, learning, teaching, and research.
It also requires shifts in the ways that we view our identity as scholars, in the ways we think about media, and in the ways that we think about social stratification. Future research should examine these issues using both theoretical and empirical approaches, reporting on both the challenges individuals face when engaging with open scholarship, their successes and failures, as well as any breakthroughs developed to address the challenges we identified. In the process of creating scholarly and educational systems for the future, we, as an education community, need to remain critical of the systems we are creating and question our assumptions and practices. While such systems might arise from the inadequacies and shortcomings of the status quo, this does not make them exemplar or just.