Project Free Our Knowledge

This is the discussion space for Project Free Our Knowledge (FOK) until our platform can host a dedicated forum of its own. Project FOK is a grassroots movement designed to overcome the collective action problem in academia, which keeps us tied to inefficient, expensive and biased systems of scholarly communication.

In brief, researchers can sign onto our platform and pledge to change their behaviour in line with various campaigns, subject to there being a predefined threshold of support in their research field. Until such time, pledges remain inactive and anonymised (if desired), protecting researchers from harm. If and when a threshold is met, the community of pledgers will be listed on the website and directed to carry out the new behaviour in unison. This strategy is designed to ‘kickstart’ support for new cultural norms (e.g. publish in and review exclusively for fee-free open access journals), while mitigating risks to vulnerable researchers (e.g. ECRs, who need publications in community-supported journals to advance their careers).

We launched a beta platform in July with 3 open access campaigns (Green, Gold, Platinum), but the plan is to develop the platform to host a much wider array of campaigns. These campaigns will be created by members of the research community and could address anything from scholarly publishing (the low-hanging fruit) to broader systemic problems facing researchers (e.g., poor employment conditions for postdocs). Some of the campaigns we're planning can be seen here, but keen for more suggestions. The main obstacle right now is funding, so if anyone has any suggestions please post them here or directly into the funding list.

Links:
Twitter
Facebook
Github
Email: info at freeourknowledge.org

Cheers,
Cooper Smout

(Note: I updated this description 21 Nov 2019 as the ideas have developed a lot since initial posting. Original description is here for posterity)