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Dive Brief:
Students for Fair Admissionshas dropped its lawsuits against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy over race-conscious admissions — practices that are no longer in effect at either institution under the Trump administration.
Both academies axed admissions goals based on race, ethnicity and gendershortly after President Donald Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, took office.
SFFA had filed the lawsuits after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 sided with the anti-affirmative action group in its landmark ruling banning race-conscious admissions at colleges but allowed the practice to continue at military academies.
Dive Insight:
In a footnote to Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — the case that ultimately ended decades of race-conscious admissions — the court said the decision did not address the practice at the nation’s military academies.
While no military academy had been party to the case, the court effectively created a carve-out for race-conscious admissions at the institutions “in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”
In a friend-of-the-court brief to that case, the Biden administration wrote that “the Nation’s military strength and readiness depend on a pipeline of officers who are both highly qualified and racially diverse — and who have been educated in diverse environments that prepare them to lead increasingly diverse forces.”
After the ruling came down, SFFA soon filed legal challenges against military academies and their race-conscious admissions policies.
In its 2023 complaint against West Point, SFFA alleged, “Instead of admitting future cadets based on objective metrics and leadership potential, West Point focuses on race.”
The lawsuit further argued: “West Point has no justification for using race-based admissions.”
SFFA’s cases against West Point and the Air Force Academy, along with another one against the U.S. Naval Academy, were in progress when Trump retook the presidency in January.
The group quickly found it had an ideological ally in the new administration, whose policies reflect SFFA’s goals.
Hegseth banned race-based admissions at the nation’s military academies in January, days after being sworn in.In doing so, Trump’s defense secretary described diversity initiatives as “incompatible with the values of DoD,” adding that “the DoD will strive to provide merit-based, color-blind, equal opportunities to Service members but will not guarantee or strive for equal outcomes.”
Hegseth has gone much further than just rejecting race-conscious admissions at the academies. Under his leadership, the Pentagon ordered the military academies to purge hundreds of books from their libraries that deal with racism and gender issues, a move that has sparked outcry as well as lawsuits and at least one reversal.
In June, the Justice Department and SFFA asked that the group’s lawsuit against the Naval Academy be declared moot, after that institution dropped race-conscious admissions under Hegseth’s directive. The case was under appeal at the time, after a federal judge upheld the institution’s policies in December. In July, an appeals court dismissed the case in response to the request from SFFA and the Justice Department.
SFFA President Edward Blum said in a June statement, “We applaud this extraordinary accomplishment by the President and the Department of Defense which restores the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our military institutions.”
The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022). These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.
In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.
Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.
Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).
Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1][FD2]
In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.
The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.
Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’ with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.
Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.
The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).
The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld. Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.
This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).
The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.
The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.
The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.
Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.
Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.
Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).
However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.
The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.
Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.
The U.S. Naval Academy has culled 400 books deemed to promote to diversity, equity and/or inclusion from its library at the insistence of the Trump administration, according to the Associated Press.
Last week, the Naval Academy, located in Annapolis, Md., identified 900 potential books to review in response to orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to remove books containing DEI-related content, TheNew York Times reported. That list included The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein on Race and Racism, and a biography of Jackie Robinson. A list of the books that were ultimately removed has not been released.
The nation’s five military academies were also told in February to eliminate admissions “quotas” related to sex, ethnicity or race after President Trump signed an executive order to remove “any preference based on race or sex” from the military. Both the Naval and Air Force Academies have also completed curriculum reviews to remove materials that allegedly promote DEI, and a West Point official also told the AP that it was prepared to review both curriculum and library materials if directed to do so by the Army.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, triggering a brutal retaliatory war in Gaza, at least 140 colleges and universities have adopted statements of institutional neutrality—up from just eight prior to the attacks, according to a new reportfrom Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit advocacy group seeking to promote viewpoint diversity on college campuses.
The vast majority of institutions—97 percent—cited the values of “community and inclusion” to justify their embrace of statement neutrality. “Free speech and academic freedom” and “public trust” were each referenced as a rationale by 88 percent of institutions; 64 percent attributed the move to “balancing rights and responsibilities.”
Of the institutions that have adopted neutrality statements since 2023, 78 percent are public and 22 percent private. Governing boards drove the change at 68 percent of the public institutions; at more than a quarter of those—including in Indiana, Utah and North Carolina—state legislatures mandated the shift. At private institutions, presidents and faculty were much more likely than governing boards to instigate the push for institutional neutrality.
“The rapid adoption of institutional statement neutrality policies marks a major shift in how colleges and universities engage with broader societal debates,” the Heterodox report reads. “Statement neutrality not only empowers students, faculty, and staff to engage in robust debate, it also reinforces the critical values of seeking truth and generating knowledge rather than advocating for partisan political positions. In an era of declining public confidence in higher education, these policies represent a critical step toward restoring universities as trusted spaces for free inquiry and intellectual growth.”
The U.S. Naval Academy’s provost told faculty last week not to use course readings “or other materials that promote” critical race theory, “gender ideology” and other topics targeted by the Trump administration, The Baltimore Banner reported.
The institution pointed to Trump’s multiple executive orders, which include one specifically restricting the curricula of military academies.
Provost Samara Firebaugh told faculty in the email to search materials for “diversity,” “minority” and other words and forbade them from using “materials that can be interpreted to assign blame to generalized groups for enduring social conditions, particularly discrimination or inequality,” the Banner reported. The Naval Academy confirmed the email to Inside Higher Ed but declined to provide a copy, saying it doesn’t share internal emails.
“That was a leak,” a representative from the institution’s public affairs office said.
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, the Naval Academy’s media relations arm said the provost’s message “provided more detailed guidance and clarity to ensure course materials and assignments are in alignment with all executive orders.” Commander Ashley Hockycko, public affairs officer at the Naval Academy, said the provost’s letter wasn’t meant to further restrict curriculum and coursework beyond the presidential executive orders—it’s just meant to provide “amplifying guidance and clarification.”
A Jan. 27 executive order titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” said educational institutions operated or controlled by the Defense Department and military “are prohibited from promoting, advancing or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist and irrational theories.” It then went on to list “gender ideology,” “divisive concepts,” “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating” and the idea “that America’s founding documents are racist or sexist.”
On Jan. 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent a memo saying, “No element within DoD will provide instruction on critical race theory, DEI or gender ideology as part of a curriculum or for purposes of workforce training“ and that military academies “shall teach that America and its founding documents remain the most powerful force for good in human history.”
The U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point didn’t respond to requests for comment Tuesday about whether they’ve released similar guidance.
Editor’s note: this guest entry has been kindly developed by Gisèle Yasmeen, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Yasmeen raises a series of important issues in the build-up to a call for a “structured dialogue” on the nature and role of knowledge in society.
~~~~~
Innovative and Engaging Communications in and Beyond the Academy
Gisèle Yasmeen, University of British Columbia
Research and scholarship is primarily about asking and answering questions as well as conserving and constantly reinterpreting fragile and easily forgotten knowledge. When I started graduate studies more than 25 years ago, there was no talk of the world wide web, no blogs, no Twitterverse, Facebook, Academia.edu and so on. I grew up in an era of card catalogues, photocopying, typewriters and hand-written letters with supervisors and collaborators. My first experience with computers was with a mainframe “Amdahl” where you had to learn complex codes to do simple word-processing! I am convinced that the dramatic communications revolution we are experiencing is and will continue to transform research, teaching and academe beyond anything we are familiar with now in the next twenty years. So, how might we succinctly envision these changes and start to prepare for the scholarly world of the possible future? Or as I was asked recently by a university Vice-President of Research, “what are the implications of digital media for post-secondary institutions?”
Many of us are still getting our heads around these questions – myself included – and follow with great interest the work of those like John Willinsky, Leslie Chan, and John Wilbanks. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to reflect on the actual and potential role of ICTs in research, teaching and scholarly communication, and to humbly offer in the conclusion my own suggestion that the time has come for a new “knowledge commission.” Hence, the intended audience is those who are new to the file and others who may be wondering, where could we take it from here?
Research: the importance of ICTs for asking and answering questions
New media tools in general – and high performance computing in particular – enable us to mine vast quantities of data (numeric, text, images, sound) at lightening speed compared to the past, which enables not only research questions to be answered but new research questions to be asked, which could not be asked before. This exciting approach to (re)discovery is at the forefront of a variety of (inter/multi/trans)disciplines ranging from bio-informatics and social statistics to the digital humanities. Examples of ICTs, “big data” and other emerging technologies leading to research breakthroughs in the natural and health sciences are well known. Most of us are familiar with the Higgs boson or “God-particle” confirmed through the CERN Hadron collider and revolutionary work on human genomics through the “barcode of life” dataset. What is perhaps less known is the growing use and study of emerging technologies in the social sciences and humanities. For example, advanced imaging technologies allowed literary scholars funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities to read and analyse an illegible and deteriorated copy of explorer David Livingstone’s diary, as reported by the New York Times. The study and use of emerging technologies, such as advanced ICTs is predicated on the development of appropriate tools for research and, as Clifford Lynch eloquently argued last year, the builders of those tools often do not get the respect they deserve as necessary “enablers” in the world of research compared to those who spend time using those tools.
In fact, the concept of what is a “discipline” is worth reflecting on in an era of joint faculty appointments between computer science and literature or philosophy and the growing number of innovative instructional programs that combine information technology, creative arts and business. What are the implications of this for institutional and program design? After all, as the English language Wikipedia entry on academic discipline, drawing from the Encyclpaedia Britannica reminds us, “The University of Paris in 1231 consisted of four faculties: Theology, Medicine, Canon Law and Arts”. We need to be vigilant about how we classify and institutionalise structures of knowledge, particularly in an era of rapidly evolving collaboration between knowledge communities. Karoline Postel-Vinay of Sciences Po, at a recent Asian studies conference in Paris, encouraged participants to challenge our currently established conceptualizations of disciplines and areas of research.
Digital media is also facilitating communication and collaboration between researchers in specialised fields in order to collectively advance and explore knowledge and is also enabling interaction with communities and experts beyond post-secondary institutions leading to the growth of “citizen science” and inter-sectoral modes of knowledge production (ie the co-creation of knowledge with “lay” collaborators). Hence, the issue of where legitimate knowledge lies and audience is an evolving one – or is it? Perhaps we need to begin by refuting the ivory tower myth. The walls of universities are and have always been porous for faculty and students. Virginia Woolf attended Oxford as one of the first women on campus and historical examples abound regarding restrictions on enrolment with respect to certain minorities either not accessing the hallowed halls of advanced education or being subject to quotas. Thankfully, this has changed for the better though barriers for many still remain, as many scholars argue. This is yet another reason to have a discussion on what is legitimate knowledge and how to structure our institutions around questions of its generation, conservation, transmission and value-addition – including reinterpretation.
Furthermore, students are the single-biggest “export of universities”. One of the fundamental purposes of higher education and research is to foster the development of the next generation as well as be challenged by the innovative ideas of youth. The Socratic dialogue continues to this day and is a necessary step in the growth and development of ideas on an individual and collective level. Young people graduate and go on to lead productive lives across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors as well as the academic world.
What we may be seeing accelerated via ICTs is an increasing blurring of boundaries with respect to knowledge intended for and/or accessed by academic audiences as well as those beyond. Data-intensive research is an area where we see sometimes very esoteric research questions being resourced and explored through digital means (e.g. medieval languages and literature) with user groups as well as commentators and “content providers” going well beyond academe. This might be compared to marketing a niche product to a global audience as well as sourcing suppliers through a global, often volunteer, network. The possibilities are endless.
However, with ICTs, as with all tools, there is always a “dark side”. There are concerns and critiques by longstanding observers of emerging and disruptive technologies, such as Heather Menzies, of the negative impacts of “real time” communications and the sometimes-associated lack of depth, reduced attention spans, and difficulty to maintain meaningful inter-subjectivity. It is said that 80-90% of human communication remains non-verbal, hence we need to be vigilant and attentive to the dynamics of learning, thought and social interaction through emerging multidisciplinary fields such as cognitive neuroscience. We need to see new media as one tool, for knowledge generation and sharing but, by no means, the only one.
A central challenge now confronting the scholarly community is how to assess the quality and impact of various types of content accessible to potentially millions of readers and commentators. This includes the conundrum of what to do with “user-generated” or self-published content. Furthermore, how do we conceptualize and classify who is a “peer” and their commentary on one’s work in various contexts given the accelerated blurring of boundaries between the academic, public, private and not-for-profit sectors? Who best plays the curatorial role of quality control in the information deluge? These are some of the fundamental and normative questions facing the world of research and scholarship, which the following section will attempt to unpack, at least in a preliminary way.
Knowledge sharing– maximising value from good quality knowledge
The previous section focused on “research”, commonly thought of as (re)discovery and analysis, but how does knowledge get documented, vetted, shared, commented-upon and preserved for present and future generations? It goes without saying that teaching in its many, rapidly evolving forms – is primarily a form of knowledge transmission and, I would argue, two way exchange between generations. Others have written in great detail about the impact of ICTs on teaching, especially the growth of on-line learning, MOOCs, Khan Academy and the like so I will not go into detail about this topic here. Suffice it to say that ICTs are having a significant impact teaching in post-secondary institutions – some of which are having difficulty rising to the challenge. Rather, I’d like to focus on the impact of ICTs on scholarly publishing and debates on how to assess the quality published output, without expecting to resolve this complex conundrum.
Bibliometrics, impact factors and indices such as the H-Index are, on the one hand, gaining importance and, on the other, coming under greater scrutiny for sometimes excluding entire scholarly communities such as humanities scholars who typically write books and those with a policy orientation who often produce “grey literature” such as technical and policy-oriented reports. In addition, there have been scandals of peer review “rings” in journals trying to enhance their impact factor. There is a tautology built into the issue of impact factor, namely that a more accessible publication tends to have wider readership and citations. Public Library of Science, or PLOS, a not-for profit publisher of open access journals that accepts roughly 70% of its peer-reviewed manuscripts and has a relatively high impact factor since it’s journals are open access. Articles rejected by PLOS journals often get published elsewhere so a general discussion on the meaning of acceptance and rejection rates are probably needed. John Willinsky also noted in a recent interview that PLOS requirements to include open access data also forces researchers to think through the quality of the datasets used to support their publications. How, therefore, to meaningfully establish the quality and impact of a publication?
The growing “open” movement, which includes open access (OA) publishing, open source technologies and open data are revolutionizing the scholarly enterprise by being based on the premise that knowledge is a public good – particularly when it is publicly-funded – and that the outputs of research and related activities should be freely available, without charge, ideally on the internet. Part of rising to the “open” challenge is an infrastructural one but this is improving through the creation of OA platforms at the institutional level. The importance of open access to research results (journals and books) as well as raw datasets (numeric, text, images and sound) is hugely important to both the world of research and broader society and lead to greater readership and impact. One concrete example to note is when a number of Québec journals dramatically increased their readership within a few years when they went OA by joining the Ėrudit platform. Another example is the journal RNA Biology requiring several years ago that all its authors to submit their abstracts to Wikipedia. Another “open” phenomenon to mention is the growth of open peer review– strongest in the health world – where open access publishers are employing fully transparent processes in their review of articles. In other words, the identity of the reviewer is disclosed, as are his or her comments on the article being submitted, the author – and others for that matter – can respond and comment. We will likely be seeing more of this type of review and resulting publications.
Conclusion – Dialogue on the nature and role of knowledge in society
I recently published an article on scholarly and research infrastructure in the new 2nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, which begins to expand established knowledge boundaries to include an unprecedented number of contributions by non-Americans, women, non-anglophones, and minorities to get a more complete picture of contemporary scholarship. The next step would be to give more serious thought to the idea of “knowledge commissions”. Examples – some considered more successful than others – include the Indian Knowledge Commission as well as Canada’s Massey Commission in the 1950s, which ultimately led to the creation of national research funding infrastructure. Given advances in technology and associated virtual and intersectoral communities of interest, practice and purpose, are we at the point where we need to establish such knowledge commissions to review the place of knowledge in society and the institutions that support its creation, conservation and transmission/exchange? New media tools have enabled us to interact in real time on a regular basis with like-minded others around the world via exchange of knowledge and information in multiple directions. This helps researchers gather and curate precious information and often engages “fellow travellers” in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. New collective voices are emerging, which were not heard before. Yes, it’s time for a structured dialogue.
The author would like to acknowledge Chad Gaffield and Kris Olds for constructive comments on an earlier version of this article
