Introducing the ‘Community’ Research Scan, available open access via the Open Scholarship Press 

by | 27 October 2025 | Community News, English

https://doi.org/10.25547/CTJW-PF92

Lisez-le en français.
Written by Alyssa Arbuckle and Brittany Amell

At a Glance / En un coup d’œil

Topic / Titre Open Scholarship Press, Community Research Scan
Key Participants / Créateur INKE Partnership, ETCL, C-SKI, Open Scholarship Press
Date / Période 2023
Keywords / Mots-clés open social scholarship / approches sociales des savoirs ouverts, open access / libre accès, open infrastructure / infrastructure ouverte, Open Scholarship Press, scholarly communication / la communication savante, publishing / édition, community engagement / engagement communautaire

Summary

This post introduces the Open Scholarship Press, and the ‘Community’ research scan by Arbuckle et al. (2023). The Open Scholarship Press makes relevant open social scholarship research and output available openly to academics and non-academics alike. The ‘Community’ research scan aims to collect and summarize recent thinking on public engagement, open social scholarship, and scholarly communication.

Creating Open Scholarship With and Across Communities— Introducing the ‘Community’ Research Scan, available open access via the Open Scholarship Press

The emergence and evolution of open digital scholarship has shone a light on the possibilities for academic work beyond the real or perceived boundaries of postsecondary institutions. Academic research can now be produced, published, and shared in a way that extends past the hallowed halls of a long-established university or the compact shelves of that university’s library. The Open Access movement has been pivotal for the largescale reconsideration of who does and who should have access to the world’s research. Community-university partnerships and concerted knowledge translation and mobilization efforts have also formalized efforts to bring various publics together around issues of shared interest. The evolution of open access to open scholarship to open social scholarship is also representative of changing notions around the purpose and possibility of academic work.

The Open Scholarship Press makes relevant open social scholarship research and output available openly to academics and non-academics alike. The Open Scholarship Press curates, publishes, and republishes foundational, significant open access work in open social scholarship, as well as important work emerging in the area.

The Community research scan (Arbuckle et al. 2023), which aims to collect and summarize recent thinking on public engagement, open social scholarship, and scholarly communication, is available via Wikibooks and PediaPress.

The Community research scan consists of nearly 300 individual annotations and is divided into three sections, each dealing with a core theme. An analytical introduction, written by Alyssa Arbuckle, opens the scan and introduces each of the sections in more depth and detail.

A brief overview of each section in the Community research scan follows.

Public & Community Engagement

Calls for more public-facing and public-engaged scholarship have emerged over recent years, as emphasized by many of the authors and annotations included in the first section, which focuses on the theme of Public & Community Engagement. This section is divided further into four sub-sections:

Open Social Scholarship

Building on public and community ideals and activities, one can look to the contemporary open movement in academia as framed in the second section, which focuses on the theme of Open Social Scholarship. The INKE Partnership defines open social scholarship as “academic practice that enables the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways” (“About INKE”). The Open Social Scholarship section is divided into the following four sub-sections:

Scholarly Communication

The ways in which academics communicate their work have evolved over time and are, in the twenty-first century, increasingly influenced by more open and more social practices.

The third and final section focuses on the theme of Scholarly Communication, and brings together contemporary issues, digital artifacts, critical approaches, and knowledge translation and mobilization. This section consists of the following sub-sections:

Last Words

Much research remains to be done on the multiple ways to create open scholarship with and across communities. As Adema (2021) writes in relation to open access specifically, “The politics and ethics of open access publishing and archiving are not predetermined, do not simply come prepackaged; they need to be creatively performed, produced, and invented by their users in an ongoing manner in response to changing technologies, practices, and conditions” (177).

The Community research scan, with its 300 or so annotations summarizing recent thinking on public engagement, open social scholarship, and scholarly communication, offers an important entry point for scholars, practitioners, teachers, and students alike.

Overall, this collection suggests that not only are there multiple branching areas of interest related to these topics but many nascent research questions, too. At any rate, the twenty-first century postsecondary sector and its practitioners are well positioned to take on academic research for, with, alongside, and of interest to broader communities.

Other Publications Available via the Open Scholarship Press

The Open Scholarship Press has published several research scans and collections that are openly available via Wikibooks including:

About the Open Scholarship Press

The Open Scholarship Press makes relevant open social scholarship research and output available openly to academics and non-academics alike. The Open Scholarship Press curates, publishes, and republishes foundational, significant open access work in open social scholarship, as well as select and important work emerging in the area.

References

Adema, Janneke. 2021. Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Arbuckle, Alyssa, Caroline Winter, Jesse Kern, Vitor Yano, Anna Honcharova, Alan Colín-Arce, Graham Jensen, Ray Siemens, Jon Bath, Jon Saklofske, and the INKE and ETCL Research Groups. 2023. Community [Research Scan]. Victoria, BC: Open Scholarship Press. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Scholarship_Press_Collections:_Community