government and found himself threatened by a national newspaper with a potential story calling for his resignation (Plashing Vole 2013). The story did not run in the end, but even the existence of the threat is enough to make some scholars worry about operating in the open.
The battle for open in terms of open scholarship is less well defined than in other aspects of open education, perhaps because it is a less well defined area itself. It is less a battle with external forces usurping practice, but more an internal one, between existing practice and the opportunities available. The relationship with commerce is one that is less fraught here; academics will use commercial sites such as Twitter, ResearchGate, Slideshare, etc., for as long as they are useful. The functions these support are part of a richer mix of the open scholar’s identity, so any one is less vital than the fundamentals of publishing or teaching, where the commercial interests have created greater tension.
The discussion of the identity of open scholars reveals that there is a tension within education itself, which is of more significance. As universities increase their awareness of the value of open scholarship to their own reputational brand, so more of them create guidelines for how to operate. Generally these are helpful and aimed at supporting the open scholar, but as more of the world moves online, so the potential damage from the types of ‘Twitter storms’ we see elsewhere increases. This creates a possible tension for the open scholar and the institution. The reason many scholars operate in the open is the freedom it offers; this liberty is perhaps the key characteristic of open scholarship, as we saw with the potential for guerrilla research. As with early MOOCs, open access publishing and use of OERs, what open scholarship permits is experimentation and autonomy, and that may be the direction the battle takes in this area.
