Page - 70 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

74 T.Amiel et al. reflected in thekindsof content produced.Largebiases exist towardcontent that is of interest toacertainkindofaudience:young,whitemen(Simonite, 2013). Thesamelackofdiversityexistsamongthecontributorsofopensourcesoftware, toanevenlargerextentthanintheITindustryasawhole.5TheGNU/Linuxoperating system is a project that, at the beginning of the century, was seen as amodel of productionindependentoftraditionalsystemsofpropertyrightsandmarkets.Today, however,most contributions to the project aremadeby ITprofessionals employed byandworkingintheinterestof largecompanies(Yegulalp,2014).Opensourceand internet technologies certainly brought new distributed and collaborative models to the corporateworld. But companies took from the original vision of commons- based peer production only the parts that made their processes of accumulation more efficient. Inmany of these projects the formal equality of opportunity does not translate to realequalityofparticipation.Notonlydo inequalities remain, in the absenceofactiveinterventionstheyareevenamplifiedinsomeimportantdimensions. A last case, especially relevant to theOERmovement, is the subversion of the ideas andproposalsof theopenaccessmovementbycommercial publishersof sci- entificjournals.Manypublishershaveusedtheirmonopolyoneditorialvalidationto maintaincontrolof thescholarlycommunication infrastructure, re-configuring their businessmodels to slowly adapt to the latter, not the spirit, of open-access public policies. They have been able to articulate amodel inwhich authors and funding agenciespaytopublishwhilekeepingpriceshighthroughartificialscarcity,market- inginprestigequantifiedthroughcitationmetrics.Theresultingcompetitionandthe natural concentrating effect ofmarket dynamics keep control over scholarly com- munication in thehandsof just a fewprivate actors. In the emerging“author pays” model, thepricepaid for thebenefitofopenaccess licensedscholarlyarticles is the exclusion of those academicswithout the capability to get funding to publish. The modelalsoleadstoconflictsofinterestsinthepeer-reviewprocessandcreatesoppor- tunities for bad actors to promote so-calledpredatory journals that publishwithout due regard for peer-review and academicmerit. The open-access case is a prime exampleofhowanarrowemphasisonthelegal technologyoflicensesdistractsfrom the real issue at hand, in this case the essential tension between public and private controlover scholarlycommunication. It’s important to note that the collateral effects noted in the cases above are not caused by the projects and movements being “open” (in the sense of being par- ticipatory, collaborative, and culturally progressive). What the examples show is that without expressing clearly themeaning and goals of their “open” values, the movements areat themercyof the statusquo. 5Forageneralanalysisof thismattersee(Nafus,2012).Threestudies(David,Waterman,&Arora, 2003;Ghosh,Glott,Krieger,&Robles, 2002;Kuechler,Gilbertson,&Jensen, 2012) founda1–2 %participation rate ofwomen in free software projects; a fourth study found a rate of 11%, but presented selectionbias, as admitted in the study (Arjona-Reina,Robles,&Dueñas, 2014).These numbers are low, even compared to the small fraction of women in the IT industry as awhole, estimated tobe26%in theUS(Ashcraft,McLain,&Eger, 2016).