The Scholarly Commons working group has been engaged in a synthesis activity over the past two years to survey the existing sets of charters, principles and best practices and tools to try to knit them together into a coherent vision and set of practices for scholarly communications.
Based on this work, we’ve concluded that the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship is, indeed a FAIR, Open, Research-object based, Citable Ecosystem that we call the scholarly commons. The principles of these scholarly commons (https://www.force11.org/scholarly-commons/principles) define ways to practice open, inclusive and reproducible science and scholarship. They can function as an agreement among researchers and other stakeholders in scholarly communication to make research open and participatory for anyone, anywhere.
Two questions arise: Do we have such an ecosystem already? If so, can we also provide concrete guidance on how to work within it?
At a workshop in Sept 2016, it was proposed to address these questions by creating a series of decision trees that would help in making research objects Open, FAIR and Citable. These decision trees are both forward and backwards looking. That is, they define a set of practices that makes research objects maximally commons compliant. But they also define practical paths for those who are interested in getting started today working with existing artifacts or with limited resources. In these cases, we want to guide people to make the best possible choices given certain contexts. Here we propose to present an introduction to the scholarly commons and present a few (3?) of the decision trees. In building those decision trees we encountered many problems related to trying to use the currently available infrastructure for scholarly communication (archives, journals, repositories, review and commenting systems, ID-systems, linking mechanisms and more) to provide guidance on working in a commons compliant way. We will discuss some of choices we made and would like to have an active debate on research practices and activities for which commons compliant options have yet to be developed.
The format we envision is either a presentation/demonstration (e.g. 25 minutes) with extensive discussion (also 25 minutes?) or a full session were we invite other speakers as well. The latter could be representatives from organisations that are identifying themselves as commons (e.g. OSF and Humanities Commons), but perhaps also a representative of underlying infrastructure (e.g. ORCID or Crossref) or a proponent of distributed solutions (using e.g. blockchain and the IPFS). Such a full session could take the format of 3-4 short presentations of 10 minutes on each representative's take on what the scholarly commons is, followed by discussion on ways forward to make scholarly communication more open, efficient and fair.