ABSTRACT
I now want to go on to make the case for participatory openness. Participatory openness needs to work synergistically with scientific and epistemic openness. The case for this form of openness comes last in the argument set out in this book, but it is not of lesser importance. Participatory openness is, in fact, crucial for achieving more equitable and effective open access. It is an important way of addressing participatory and testimonial injustices that occur in the research system. However, achieving participatory openness requires significant change in approaches to scholarly communication, and reshaping of incentive and reward structures in the academy. Many of the changes required are far-reaching, beyond the territory of open access and open science, and so, I will argue, they can only be achieved through concerted and sustained effort involving a wide range of actors in the research system. After dealing with a key contextual epistemic issue, I will focus the discussion in this chapter initially on open access. I will then widen the focus progressively by talking about open science, followed by scholarly communication in general, and then participatory issues in the broader research system. Whilst discussing these wider issues, I will keep the connections with OA in view. A good number of the practice-related issues covered in this chapter have received a lot of attention in recent debates on open access, so there is no need for me to rehearse the arguments in detail here. Rather, my purpose is to outline the key issues briefly, but, importantly, to set them within the context of my overall argument in this book for scientific, epistemic, and participatory openness.
