Bridging Gaps by Unlocking the Community Potential - Empowerment through Infrastructure and Networking

Abstract

Community-focused infrastructure and networking are often organised in a decentralised manner. Such structures are based on a collaborative peer to peer approach with openness as a basic requirement for gaining common agreements. They could thus make a certain contribution to counterbalance centralised exclusive approaches - whether political or economic. We argue that this approach is effective, both as a method to promote and further develop scientific publishing as an important facet of scientific communication, and as a communication approach to support openness and respectful interaction.

Within this workshop we will focus on structures emerging from scholarly-led and scholarly-owned Diamond Open Access publishing. Together with the participants we will explore such community-borne approaches with regard to their potential to back up open science.

The infrastructure of non-commercial publishing is spread across many players: researchers, research institutions, institutional publishing services, scholar-led initiatives, and many more besides. However, to create a focused and comprehensive service portfolio that provides favourable publication conditions for researchers, these players must be connected. Structures must be created to enable the community of practice to collaborate. Synergising the general idea of Diamond Open Access publishing with individual researchers, initiatives and activities will enable communities to realise their full potential and to work collaboratively and on equal footing to pursue it.

How can a decentralised community be empowered to contribute to a common perspective on scientific publishing? How can a community be given open structures that are strong, binding and sustainable enough to enable it to work towards a shared vision? Can a collaborative peer to peer approach be considered as the preferred way to keep scholarly communication open and in community’s hands in the wake of today’s challenges?

We want to explore these questions in the workshop. Its aim is to develop a concept for a community-oriented approach in building and organising strong and sustainable networks. We want to sketch an efficient and transparent community-building plan based on the participants' tangible experiences.

As a method, we want to move from the concrete to the abstract in two steps. First we want to collect the participants' experiences in their community oriented work. Building on the experiences of the Publisher's Living Handbook for Diamond Open Access of the EU-funded CRAFT-OA project and the OJS Network of the DFG-funded German Capacity Centre (SeDOA), we will work together to develop more precise requirements for a sustainable community-oriented approach in a second step. In this way, we would like to discuss different approaches in dealing with communities of practice. The synergies of the Community of Practice are to be utilised and transferred into a higher-level concept.