The term open access (OA) strongly aligns with everything that is known about the future of knowledge creation and distribution. Under a loose definition of open access sprouts many different facets of information dissemination including open research, open review, open data, and more broadly, the concept of open science and scholarship. The meaning of openness referred to in each of these is still highly disputed. Does open mean that knowledge is freely available to everyone? Does it mean that the process of knowledge creation should be made more efficient and goal oriented? Or does it mean that the priority should be making platforms, tools, and services for researchers more openly available?
Benedikt Fecher and Sascha Friesike offer up their take on open science and scholarship, specifically open science as one term under five schools of thought.
According to Fecher’s and Friesike’s “
Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought” the five schools of thought were built from patterns recognized in current open science discourse to discover the new directions that open science research is heading. Under the umbrella term open science comes those five schools: pragmatic school, infrastructure school, public school, measurement school, and democratic school.
Infrastructure School- Assumption: Research depends on what tools and resources are readily available to researchers.
- Goal: Creating open platforms and tools for researchers and scientists.
Public School- Assumption: Science research must be openly accessible to the public without
- Goal: Making science available to all public citizens.
Measurement School- Assumption: Today’s scientific research needs alternate impact measures.
- Goal: To develop that alternate measurement tool for scientific impact.
Democratic School- Assumption: Access to knowledge is unfairly distributed.
- Goal: Knowledge needs to be made freely available to everyone.
Pragmatic School- Assumption: If scientists worked together, research would be more efficient.
- Goal: To make research more efficient and goal driven.
However one decides to interpret open science or openly available research, there’s a school or definition that should encompass how they interpret it.
IGI Global fully supports the open science and scholarship movement and maintains a deep awareness of the aforementioned schools of thought. Over the years, through a high level of transparency and collaboration, the publishing house has been more aggressively working to make much of its published scientific research and data as openly accessible as possible. Through a multi-faceted approach to open material, including 31 gold and 1 platinum open access journals, OA chapter and book publishing, helpful open resources in their online
newsroom, article processing charge (APC) funding programs, liberal fair use policies, and convenient data sharing, IGI Global is becoming a known force in this movement.
All IGI Global OA content receives the same level of production attention and vetting (through a rigorous double-blind peer review process) as non-open access books and journal articles. IGI Global publishes OA content under a wide range of
subjects including:
- Business & Management
- Computer Science & IT
- Education
- Environment & Agriculture
- Government & Law
- Library & Information Science
- Media & Communications
- Medicine & Healthcare
- Science & Engineering
- Security & Forensics
- Social Sciences & Humanities
About IGI Global
Founded in 1988, IGI Global, an international academic publisher, is committed to producing the highest quality research (as an active full member of the Committee on Publication Ethics “COPE”) and ensuring the timely dissemination of innovative research findings through an expeditious and technologically advanced publishing process. Through their commitment to supporting the research community ahead of profitability, and taking a chance on virtually untapped topic coverage, IGI Global has been able to collaborate with over 100,000+ researchers from some of the most prominent research institutions around the world to publish the most emerging, peer-reviewed research across 350+ topics in 11 subject areas including business, computer science, education, engineering, social sciences, and more. To learn more about IGI Global, click here.
Newsroom Contact
Caroline Campbell
Assistant Director of Marketing and Sales
(717) 533-8845, ext. 144
ccampbell@igi-global.com
www.igi-global.com