Guidelines for a contemporary, open academia

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Hannud Abdo, Alexandre

Edité par CCSD -

International audience. As a researcher interested in taking advantage of currentpossibilities to work in harmony with practical academicprinciples – criticism, verifiability , incrementality, recombination,replicability– and those of society – dialogue, participation andrational use of resources – I often face the lack of support orobstacles to the good fruition of my work. Several times thesedifficulties arise from the very lack of technique and habit ofdoing research with such possibilities in mind, but there is also alot which academic institutions can do for those who have beenfighting against the cultural inertia of a profession.Universities, institutes and research agencies, especially inBrazil, have lived at least for a decade in a state of contradiction.On one hand, the movement for more sharing and collaborationwith respect to knowledge kept and produced, and with respect toavailable resources, cannot be postponed any longer, as we see agrowing number of applications in academia of innovations madepossible by technology and by collaboration and sharing culture,which have already transformed and made more dynamic bothsociety and the economy (benkler, 2006). Even in administrativeaspects there is an urgent need to cast light over the accounts andcontracts of those institutions. On the other hand, a corporativeattitude, of high walls and of “owners of knowledge”, acts againstthese innovations. Disconnected from contemporaneity and fed byhabit and for the justified perpetuation of the way of life of part ofacademia, this kind of attitude manifests itself in different aspectsof academic life, and can be found sometimes entrenched in viciouscycles of privileges and anachronistic interests. These need tobe overcome so that, gradually, academia may give room to newexperimentations with its modes of production.Infrastructure, training and scientific policy – the latter interms of funding, acknowledgement, guidelines and incentives –are aspects of academic life over which institutional support canmake a difference to the adoption of operational innovation. Bycrossing them with the axes of practice of open science, from openaccess to citizen science, it is possible to draw a framework for whatneeds to be done in order to position an institution as mobilizer ofa more effective and development prone kind of research.This text does not seek to justify a position for open science,which we believe has been extensively justified in so many others(nielsen, 2011; cardoso; jacobetty; duarte, 2012). Thus, westart from the principle that universal and immediate access tothe products of scientific processes, which allows for collaborativeparticipation in this process and stimulates competition thatrewards the capacity for innovation and not access to the means, isof the essence in detailing de actions described.

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