Open Scholarship and the need for collective action

Many of the challenges in navigating the transition to Open Scholarship are economic, either in the sense of being directly financial, or in the sense of being related to incentives. We therefore focus on the economic arena. Our conclusion is that it is challenging to capture the full details of the economy of Open Scholarship in terms of existing models. Application of economic theory and analysis techniques to Open Scholarship needs further exploration and development. An important aspect of the scholarly landscape and the transition to Open Scholarship is the diversity of actors involved. These can be described as ‘micro’ (individuals such as researchers, or support staff, users of research or employees of service providers), ‘meso’ (groups, communities or organisations such as universities, disciplines, scholarly societies or publishers) and ‘macro’ (‘system-spanning’ actors that provide structure to whole countries or regions, such as funders and governments). Insufficient attention has been paid to the incentives, actions and influences of meso-actors, and therefore a major focus of this book is on meso- actors. We conclude that the key to making progress is to better understand and overcome challenges of collective action.