Engaging Platforms in Open Scholarship/Executive Summary

Platforms, broadly understood as digital systems that connect users, facilitate content exchange, and enable various forms of interaction, have evolved beyond technical infrastructure into complex mediators that shape how knowledge is created, accessed, and governed—challenging traditional notions of scholarly communication and open access in the process.

This environmental scan focuses on surveying a range of perspectives on platforms, which can be understood as a set of tools, techniques, and technologies that connect different groups of users together; host or otherwise facilitate user-generated content; support opportunities for social networking; enable the exchange of good or services and capital; facilitate the exchange of information, files, media, or content; or allow for code to be written or run.

A range of platforms from across the spectrum are considered. These include commercial platforms (such as YouTube and Facebook, as well as platform cooperatives—see: platform.coop); non-profit platforms (such as Mastodon); and non-commercial platforms (such as HSSCommons.ca). Tensions between predominately market-based platform conceptualizations and their application to open access initiatives are revealed, as are questions around whether the term is appropriately applied to these initiatives. These questions include:

  • To what extent might we re-conceptualise or repurpose notions of platforms in order to better meet the values and aims of open scholarship and the open access community more broadly?
  • What platform models or configurations, if any, might be drawn on to ensure long-term sustainability? Similarly, which configurations, if any, may be more effective at zeroing the extractive dynamics that characterize commercial platforms?

This scan aims to provide a broad array of resources—and starting place—for researchers, community members, educators, students, and anyone with an interest in the broad topic of platforms and open scholarship. Open scholarship is a meta-disciplinary phrase often used by those in the humanities and social sciences to signal a constellation of practices that involve or emphasize community-driven initiatives, outreach, and multi-stakeholder partnerships, all with the aim of reducing gaps between application / practice and academic theory / research (Arbuckle et al. 2022; Arbuckle & Stewart 2017; Huculak 2019). It encompasses open data, open-source software, open access, open educational resources, and “all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment” (Arthur et al. 2021, 795).

The extensively annotated bibliography consists of 114 individual annotations, which are 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.

Other contributions offered by this scan that may be of interest to community members relate to:

  • The continual blurring between platforms and infrastructures reveals critical tensions between market-driven dynamics and public knowledge commons, and raises questions about ownership, control, and sustainability in digital spaces.
  • The evolution of platform governance models shows a spectrum from corporate-controlled to community-driven approaches, with emerging alternatives like platform cooperatives and knowledge commons offering potential pathways for more democratic knowledge sharing.
  • The increasing platformization of scholarly communication demands careful consideration of ethical implications, from data sovereignty and privacy to labor exploitation and environmental impact, particularly as platforms shape both the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

Our hope is that readers 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.

This and other themed bibliographies can be found for free online as a Wikibook, at Open Scholarship Press Collections.

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