Distributed Open Collaborative Scholarship · Commonplace

"Distributed Open Collaborative Scholarship (DOCS) is a major new initiative that aims to redirect the technologization of knowledge by building structures (disciplines, practices, ethics) and infrastructures around a new ecological economics of teaching and learning, research and publishing. It builds on existing interventions such as FemTechNet, a Distributed Open Collaborative Course for students, scholars and artists working on feminist science and technology studies2; Fembot/Ada, a research collective and associated open access publication3; Goldsmiths Press, a new university press in the UK, dedicated to challenging the restrictions of neoliberal scholarship;4 Humanities Commons, a US project bringing together open access scholarship and teaching materials in the humanities5 and open access platforms such as arXiv.org and SOCarXiv.6

DOCS is a necessary addition to the current landscape because much of the current activity either sits within or fails to challenge neoliberal values that apply across the entire ecology of teaching and learning, research and publishing and incorporate both the sciences and humanities. Neoliberal economies promote and support open science at the expense of open humanities and globally, Arts, Humanities and Social Science disciplines are under threat. The development of commercial platform based publishing and scholarship, such as academia.edu, tends to be parasitic on both publishers and the academy, extracting published research with no reciprocal financial contribution. Moreover, by selling data based on research hits and trends, it represents something like the Twitter model for the future dystopia of scholarly communications in which the value of knowledge itself, and its social and environmental agency is subordinated to its economic value. Commercial platforms represent the next phase in the capitalization of knowledge and tend towards replacing old monopolies for new, the giants of commercial journal publishing with tech giants such as Amazon and Google...."