Free Our Knowledge website and discussion forum
Hi! Thanks for dropping by :)
Vision Statement
We're building a platform that helps researchers organise the collective uptake of open research practices, so that groups of individuals can do the best research possible without risking their careers in the process.
About the project
Academia is trapped in a collective action problem, whereby individuals are incentivised to act against the best interests of their community and, ultimately, themselves. For example, sharing data and code could allow researchers to validate and build on each others’ work more efficiently, thus saving countless hours of duplicated effort, but individuals may worry that doing so will place them at a competitive disadvantage. Similarly, publishing research in fee-free ('Platinum') open access journals could drastically decrease publication costs and place the control of scholarly communication in the hands of the research community, but individuals may worry that these outlets do not confer sufficient prestige to ensure their survival in a competitive job market. Problems like these -- in which groups of individuals fail to reach a preferable state due to conflicting personal interests -- are known as collective action problems) and can often be resolved by organising a critical mass of individuals to take action in a coordinated manner ('collective action'; Olson, 1965). Despite the increasing use of the internet to organise collective action on a global scale, however (e.g., Kickstarter, Collaction), the global research community has yet to embrace collective action as a potential catalyst for positive cultural change in academia.
At Project Free Our Knowledge (FOK), we're building the world's first collective action platform for the research community. Our website lets researchers signal their intentions to adopt progressive research behaviours if and when there is a pre-determined level of support in the community. Pledges remain inactive and anonymised until this time, allowing vulnerable individuals to signal their desire for positive culture change without risk to their career. Then -- after the critical mass is met -- all signatories are de-anonymised on the website and directed to carry out the action together, thus creating momentum for change and protecting each other's interests through collective action. We anticipate that over time, these campaigns will grow increasingly larger in size and scope, and eventually become a powerful driving force in aligning the academic system with the needs of research community and principles of science itself.
Project structure
This repository contains the code to build the FOK website as well as other documents relevant to the project. Issues are used for proposing new campaigns (see the template), linking to Utterances comments at the bottom of campaign pages, raising issues about the website build and any other strategic discussions for the project. We're using a Project board to organise to-do tasks.
How you can support Project FOK
- Connect with us
- Watch + star this repository (top right of this page)
- Join our mailing list
- Follow us on Twitter and Facebook
- Join our Google Group
- Share our crowd-funding campaign
- Pledge to any live campaigns on the website that you can
- Comment on campaign drafts and project issues and/or add a thumbs up to show which campaigns have community support. Propose a new campaign for something you're passionate about using the Issues feature
- Read the project roadmap to see how you can contribute
- Look through the Project board to see if there's any tasks you can complete
Credit
This website was built using Beautiful Jekkyl by Dean Attali, forked and edited by Cooper Smout