Engaging Platforms in Open Scholarship/Abstract

This environmental scan examines the concept of platforms—broadly understood as digital systems that connect users, facilitate content exchange, and enable various forms of interaction—through an analytical introduction and comprehensive annotated bibliography. While the term carries multiple meanings across disciplines, this work adopts a core understanding of platforms as tools, techniques, and technologies that connect different user groups, host user-generated content, enable social networking and communication, facilitate various forms of exchange, and support code execution. The scan considers platforms across the spectrum from commercial to non-profit implementations, particularly examining tensions between market-based platform conceptualizations and their application to open access initiatives. The annotated bibliography contains 114 individual annotations, and is organized into five main sections: Understanding Platforms; Researching Platforms and Digital Environments; Social Implications of Platforms; Models and Mechanisms of Platform Governance and Regulation; and Alternative Models and Approaches. Researchers, community members, educators, students, and anyone else with an interest in the broad topic of platforms, platform studies, and the study of digital and online artifacts will find this scan offers various entry points for understanding platforms as complex socio-technical systems, with particular attention to critical questions of definition, governance, ethics, and sustainability in contemporary knowledge creation and dissemination.