When the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began on January 31, 2020, no-one could have anticipated the impact that it would have on our scholarly communication and publishing systems. That is, perhaps, unless you work on open source software. Right now, global research communities are united to collaborate on solving the threat of the pandemic, sharing resources and knowledge more efficiently and effective than ever before, a process broadly described as ‘open scholarship’ (Dunleavy, 2020). This is essentially akin to how free and open source software (FOSS) communities have been operating now for decades (Willinsky, 2005). Recently, we participated in a “massively open online paper”, or MOOP, that explored the intersections between FOSS and open scholarship (Tennant, Agarwal, et al., 2020). Here, we want to summarise our key findings from that project, and place them in the context of the current outbreak. Critically, this pandemic shows us that many of the pervasive and systemic issues surrounding the evaluation, valuation, use and operationalisation of “openness” in scholarship can be extremely easily bypassed when the social demand and urgency is there, thus showing that the primary barriers towards open scholarship are inherently political and not technical.
What can scholars learn from Open Source software communities during pandemics
