Avoiding Openwashing with the OER World Map ‘Openness Indicator’ [1149] Members : #OER16

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Tue, Apr 19 2016, 11:30am – 1:00pm

Authors: Jan Neumann

Room: Prestonfield

Theme: Strategic and reputational advantages of openness

Type: Presentation

Description

The OER World Map project aims at collecting and visualizing data about actors, services, projects and events related to OER in order to support the efforts of the OER community to organize and understand itself. The Hewlett funded project started back in 2013 and will be continued to be funded in 2016 targeting at refining the platform and increasing the size of its user community (OER World Map, 2015).

Major achievements of phase II, which took place in 2015, where the development of an initial version of the production platform as well as the installation of a global country champion network. By importing several existing datasets, a basis for further data input and enrichment was established. The first part of the presentation will provide a short summary of the results of the first collaborative data collection phase with a special emphasis on the situation of the OER movement in the UK.

Openness has been of special importance for the project from the beginning on. Initially it was planned to collect only “real” OER services, e.g. repositories, which include resources licensed CC BY, CC BY-SA and eventually CC BY-NC. Intensive discussion resulted in loosening up this narrow collection strategy, because focusing exclusively on the used licenses did not seem to address the complexity of openness in an adequate way.

In order to keep the focus on openness, we felt that it was necessary to integrate a compensating ‘Openness Indicator’ (‘OI’, OER World Map, 2015a), which will help to perceive the level of openness a service offers at one sight by providing a score from 0-100. The OI will be included in the OER World Map Platform, allowing a user to restrict her/his search to services which meet the required level of openness or check the degree of openness of a service she/he is interested in. In the long run the OI even might develop into a quality certification (“certified open repository”).

While the OI compresses the degree of openness in one number, the taxonomies lying behind characterize different aspects of openness and therefore also might help to understand different forms of openwashing better. The development of the indicator is influenced by the ‘How open is it?’ scheme (SPARC & PLOS, 2014), which was designed for analyzing Open Access Journals. Due to significant differences between Open Access and OER it could not be reused without modification for the OER World Map. The indicator will include several dimensions of openness (Access, Reuse Rights, Metadata/Machine Readability, Open Formats and Platform Desing). The second part of the presentation will explain the design of the indicator, discuss how it can be used as an effective tool to avoid openwashing and show examples of its application.

References

OER World Map (2015). Launching the Development of an OER World Map: Phase III. https://oerworldmap.wordpress.com/project-proposals/proposal-for-phase-iii-2016/

OER World Map (2015a). Openness Indicator for OER Services https://oerworldmap.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/openness-indicator

SPARC & PLOS (2014). How Open Is It? Open Access Spectrum. https://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/hoii-guide_V2_FINAL.pdf

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