#Open: An Introduction
NECS Open Scholarship Committee (Bregt Lameris, Miriam de Rosa, Victoria Pastor-González, Jeroen Sondervan)
The contemporary domain of open science and scholarship[1] has considerable breadth, constituting a novel paradigm across all facets of the research continuum, workflows, and outreach activities. It encompasses free dissemination of open access scholarly outputs, sharing of research datasets, formulation of innovative research evaluation frameworks that do justice to the wide range of academic activities we all engage in, creating open forms of education and fostering public engagement, as well as citizen science initiatives.
What open science can entail has been recorded in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science in 2021. As stated in this recommendation, open science:
…is a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole. Open science is about making sure not only that scientific knowledge is accessible but also that the production of that knowledge itself is inclusive, equitable and sustainable.[2]
It is therefore not without reason that the initial NECS ‘Publication Committee’ changed its name to ‘Open Scholarship Committee’ and presented a statement on open scholarship at the NECS Annual General Meeting 2021, also meant to prepare the NECS community for these developments.[3]
This special section #Open, guest edited by members of the NECS Open Scholarship Committee, engages with questions of openness as an inherently broad notion. Such a concept underpins a variety of practices in scholarship as well as in publishing, and allows us to reconsider and ethically reposition our work as researchers, educators, practitioners, and authors working in the fields of film and media studies. To this end, this issue investigates #Open from a number of different perspectives that are all interwoven in practices of our academic work as media scholars.
Fundamentally, cultivating open research practices necessitates a paradigmatic shift within the academic research and pedagogical environment. On a more creative level, cinema and media as areas of research have historically engendered an approach to thinking of new, accessible, and open ways to present research results like new digital book formats,[4] but also video essays, podcasts, online interactive media artefacts and, more recently, expository papers opening the black boxes of data and code.
The advantages conferred by open access to scholarly publications and research datasets, particularly those adhering to the F.A.I.R. principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) of data within the humanities, and more specifically within the purview of media studies, mirror the benefits discernible across academic disciplines universally: facilitating the dissemination of scholarly knowledge, alleviating the strain on institutional library budgets, and above all engendering a heightened readership.[5] Moreover, these openly available research outputs could create more meaningful impact through outreach and public engagement activities targeted at those audiences that can really benefit.
To drive interest in and knowledge of creative ideas on openness, we are presenting this special section of the diamond open access journal NECSUS, collecting articles and essays on the theme of #Open. Bearing this in mind, this section reflects upon and practices openness at once – not only giving insight on the challenges and opportunities of openness in media studies, but also gathering a diamond open collection of articles and essays, with no financial burden for readers as well as authors. In particular, the contributions gathered here engage with questions such as how are media configurations addressing openness content-wise, using narrative and engagement strategies that invite us to think about problems from open-ended storytelling and open and closed systems to questions of openness in art, cinema, (digital) archives, or the digital humanities.
Also, this strand explores the dynamics between media platforms, content producers, and audiences. It raises questions about how these systems facilitate openness and inclusivity and democratise creative processes – or, conversely, restrict access and participation. This impacts the very epistemology of media, challenging their pre-fixed scripts versus interactive media practices, creating new assemblages, connecting creators and audiences through collective generative practices of meaning, and initiating alternative forms of media consumption and distribution. Also, questions on ‘openness in research and creative practice’ are of interest. Within this broader field of openness, contributions focus specifically on open scholarship, understood as open access publishing, open data, open peer review, open source software, open archives, and libraries.
The common thread cross cutting these objects and practices is open scholarship, conceived as a method to foster transparency, reproducibility, diversity, inclusion, and public engagement. A commitment to open scholarship demands that we consider carefully where and how we publish our research, and with whom. [6] Are we ready, supported, and equipped to challenge existing structures and hierarchies that reproduce inequalities?
An important step, at least in Europe, for advancing inclusive and equitable publishing took place in May 2023, when the ‘EU-Council Conclusions on Open Scholarly Communication’, from the European Ministers of Science, was published.[7] In these conclusions they called upon EU member states to counter the growing and financially unsustainable dependency on commercial publishers by investing in non-profit, academic-led publishing initiatives.
NECSUS is only one of the European examples in our academic disciplinary fields that, from its inception in 2012, tried to tear down inequalities by not charging any fees to authors and readers (i.e. the diamond open access models), but instead looked for a collective funding model. Of course many more journals with the same ambition exist, like Screen, View, and Alphaville, to name just a few.[8] However, it has proven difficult to make such, mostly community-driven, initiatives sustainable. Many struggled or are still struggling for their existence. In the upcoming years it is of the utmost importance that the academic community, the non-profit diamond open access journals, and open access platforms work together to find ways to collectively and sustainably fund these non-profit and mostly academic-led endeavours.
Let us be honest: all too often we as researchers are still tied to our ‘exclusive’ journals or book series that are in most cases published by prestigious (large) for-profit publishers. Mainly because this gives us a certain (perceived and subjective) prestige. Or is it simply necessary because of fixed ideas around research assessment in academia? This is probably where open science as a way of embracing scholarship labour clashes with a higher education system that is still profoundly based upon reputation, that legitimises free labour (think of peer review or uncontracted volumes that are regularly published). The situation demands a shift in the ethical standard of scholarly production).[9] This can be understood as Kathleen Fitzpatrick described in her book Generous Thinking:
a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go.[10]
The practical challenges of openness as a mode of conceiving scientific production on the whole are addressed rather clearly by the portfolio of two case studies comprising this special section. They both shed light on practical concerns and problems encountered in the frame of initiatives to open up the field of media studies from an archival (Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway) and publisher’s (Jeff Pooley) perspective. What also clearly emerges from these examples is that open scholarship comes with open infrastructures.[11] This is also an essential part of the aforementioned UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.
While these initiatives tackle practical issues, they also provide a vocabulary that is adopted, thematised, and possibly expanded by the research articles gathered in this special section. The variety of topics that they touch upon is to us demonstrating that openness is an indispensable category of our methodological and conceptual toolkit as scholars, regardless of the specific area of reference and application of our research.
The article by Josephine Diecke and Kai Matuszkiewicz explores how the evolving landscape of academic publishing is reshaping media studies, with emerging formats challenging traditional practices. Focusing on the Open Media Studies (OMS) Blog, the study examines open access publication practices through a praxeological lens, emphasising the sociotechnical dimensions of this shifting environment. The concept of ‘lived’ open science is central, guiding content curation, format selection, and engagement strategies. The OMS Blog serves as a dynamic platform for diverse perspectives, embodying principles of open scholarship. By scrutinising their own editorial practices, the authors engage in self-reflection, revealing the complexities of embracing openness. They explore the boundaries of openness and conduct a comparative analysis of publication ecosystems, highlighting platforms like Hypotheses for transdisciplinary exchange. The study also investigates the evolving roles of authors, editors, publishers, and readers in response to changing scholarly demands and how the transition from a media studies peer group to broader humanities reflects a commitment to democratising science communication.
Sureshkumar Sekar addresses openness in relation to videographic criticism. He pushes the boundaries of the video essay as a heuristic object, claiming that using multiple units of meaning potential in written and spoken word, still and moving images, sound and music, and other such building blocks of a communicative entity all merge to create a critical practice that the author defines polymedial essayism. Moving from the method of reappropriation as the key process in videographic studies, Sekar looks into [in]Transition as a vantage point to observe essayistic practice broadly conceived and offers precious insight into the self-reflective analysis operated by some scholars within the field. This is scrutinised by intersecting such a practice with a framework of semiotic reminiscence that adopts a number of categories borrowed from multimodal studies. The result is an original and engaging text featuring a meta-reflection able to open up the perspective onto the very practice of essay composition.
Mel Jordan and Giorgia Rizzioli address the topic of open in terms of publics and publicness. With their concept of ‘open montage’, they look into the media configurations resulting from the entangled relations between art, cinema and urban space. According to the authors, differently from the guided and aided spectators in the movie theater and from the gallery visitors, the viewers of public art and public moving image screenings embody a posthumanist perspective which ensures a full engagement with artistic and cinematic interventions in space. This attitude attends to the complexity of urban space itself, relativising the role of the human subject as the primary axis for comprehending the world, hence shedding light on the political possibilities for communal coexistence of humans, nature and things. Moving from the analysis of the experimental project Screening Coventry: Past is Now, Jordan and Rizzioli delve into the performative impact of public art interventions. Their notion of open montage describes new spatio-temporal assemblages, where alternative forms of media display and consumption emerge through collective practices. By focusing on openness, their article fosters new interpretations of agency and the audience’s role in shaping media-space intersections.
Irena Řehořová explores the concept of openness as a creative principle within audiovisual archives and memory. To do this, she focuses on repurposing home movies and found footage, using the film Reconstruction of Occupation (Jan Šikl, 2021) as a case study, which documents the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. For the film, Šikl invited audiences to contextualise the footage, and he gathered additional home movies through crowdsourcing. Furthermore, in the film he adopted an open narrative structure, assembling fragments from various amateur filmmakers organically. Through this case study, Řehořová addresses interesting facets of openness, such as the accessibility of the archive, the semantic ambiguity of archival images, crowdsourcing practices, open narrative structures, the inconclusiveness of historical processes, and the artistic benefits of embracing openness.
The article by Ted Fisher and Don Allan Mitchell combines oral history methodology and documentary filmmaking in an archival project that aimed to open up the archive to marginalised Black voices in Mississippi. The combination of both methodologies was necessary, in order to create material that was both acceptable for future documentary production and valuable as an oral history source. The result was a series of high quality video interviews establishing an open digital oral history archive at Delta State University, focusing on documenting the legacy of the historically-Black East Side High School in Cleveland, Mississippi and the era of Jim Crow segregation. In this article the authors lay out the essential conflicts they encountered, define community-driven projects, and discuss ethical standards and practical considerations for such an open project.
In the final article of the special section, ethnographers Lucile Ottolini and Marianne Noel take us back to the concept of lived open science, this time considered through the lenses of the sociology of work and professions. Through an exploration of the roles, experiences, profiles, and practices of two distinct groups – one responsible for opening institutions to society and the other for opening up publications – the authors track the emergence of a unique professional category devoted to and shaped by the principles of open science. Grounded in empirical data gathered from interviews, participant observations, and institutional archives from the early 2000s to the late 2020s in France and Sweden, the article catalogues the required skills for ‘opening up’ science and examines the support structures available to professionals involved in these activities. The authors then delve into a comparative analysis between openness to society and openness in science, identifying commonalities and differences. Notably, they observe varying strategies for quantification and credibility enhancement among professionals. Finally, the authors analyse the institutional shifts driving open policies and offer a critical reflection on current open science strategies.
A common theme emerging from the groups surveyed in this last project is that of invisibility, specifically at the institutional level. We hope that the projects and practices uncovered in this special section serve as inspiration to all members of the academic community to embrace the concept of lived open science wholeheartedly. It is important that we continue to approach open scholarship with a holistic view. We should contribute to making the invisible seen, the inaccessible available – to increase cooperation and take concrete steps to advance the practice of open scholarship.
Authors
Bregt Lameris (Open Universiteit) is working as a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Open Universiteit in The Netherlands. In 2023 she successfully finished her habilitation in Film and Media Studies at the University of Zurich. Her research interests are colour in media, media archaeology, film archiving, film historiography, affect, emotions, and subjectivity in film, media and mental health, and disability media studies. In 2017 she published her first monograph Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography: The Case of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1946- 2000), which is available in open access through Amsterdam University Press. Her second monograph Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture (1950s-1960s) will be published in 2024 by Open Book Publishers.
Miriam de Rosa researches and teaches film, media theories, and archaeology at Ca’ Foscari, University of Venice, where she is Associate Professor in Film and Screen Media. Among her most recent publications are: Off the grid and Experimenting in circles (2023), Media | Processes (2022), and Making conjunctions: Thinking topologically with contemporary artists’ moving images (2021). For NECSUS, she guest edited the special section on #Gesture in 2019 and also acts as exhibition reviews editor. De Rosa coordinates the IMACS consortium, is a member of the NECS steering committee, and is active as an independent film curator.
Victoria Pastor-González is Senior Lecturer at Regent’s University London. Her research interests include Spanish and Latin American docudrama, representations of memory, trauma, and political conflict in film, and multimodal pedagogies. She has published in the areas of fact-based drama, female biopics, active learning in higher education, and learner-generated materials. Her latest research on historical biopics appeared in the Journal of Comparative Cinema (2021). Since 2018 she has acted as co-editor for the book review section of NECSUS.
Jeroen Sondervan is associated with Dutch Research Council – NWO. Besides his work on open access and open science in different capacities (as publisher, librarian, and policy-maker), he has advocated for advancing inclusive and equitable open access models, preprint adoption, and changing the publishing culture in film and media studies, through various initiatives such as developing NECSUS and the preprint server MediArXiv.
References
Adema, J. and Moore, S. ‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’, Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing Within the University. New Formations, Author Accepted Manuscript, 2024: https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/files/91176366/Adema_and_Moore_-_Just_One_Day_-_AAM.docx.
Council of the EU. ‘Council calls for transparent, equitable, and open access to scholarly publications’, 2023: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-9616-2023-INIT/en/pdf
European Commission. ‘Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication. Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission’, Brussels, 30 January 2019: https://publications.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/464477b3-2559-11e9-8d04-01aa75ed71a1.
Eve, M. Open access and the humanities: Contexts, controversies and the future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Finch Group. ‘Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings’, 19 March 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160420231330/http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/.
Fitzpatrick, K. Generous thinking: A radical approach to saving the university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.
Moore, S., Deville, J., and Nadim, T. (eds) The commons and care. Coventry: Post Office Press and Rope Press, 2018. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6901ZF54.
NECS. ‘Statement on Open Scholarship’, 2021: https://cms.necs.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/version_2_draft_necs_statement_on_open_science_and_scholarship.pdf
Okune, A. et al. ‘Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science’ in Connecting the knowledge commons: From projects to sustainable infrastructure. The 22nd International Conference on Electronic Publishing: Revised selected papers, edited by P. Mounier. Marseille: OpenEdition Press, 2019: http://books.openedition.org/oep/9072.
Sondervan, J. ‘“Just doing it”: Five Talks on Digital Scholarship and Open Book Publishing’, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/zgak-vf59.
The Guardian. ‘Elsevier Are Corrupting Open Science in Europe’, 29 June 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe.
UNESCO. ‘Recommendation on Open Science’, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54677/MNMH8546.
UNESCO. ‘Bolstering open science infrastructures for all’, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54677/QZPQ1991.
Further readings on #Open
Kamp, C. The greatest films never seen: The film archive and the copyright smokescreen. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
_____ (ed.). A history of intellectual property in 50 objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2019.
Keathley, C. Mittell, J., and Grant, C. ‘The Videographic Essay. Practice and Pedagogy’: http://videographicessay.org(accessed 6 August 2021).
Pantenburg, V. ‘Videographic film studies and the analysis of camera movement’, NECSUS, Spring 2016: https://necsus-ejms.org/videographic-film-studies-and-the-analysis-of-camera-movement/.
Poster, M. ‘CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere’, 1995: http://www.artefaktum.hu/it2/poster2.html.
Schmidt, B., Ross-Hellauer, T., van Edig, X., and Moylan, E. ‘Ten considerations for open peer review’, F1000Research, 7, 29 June 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.15334.1.
UNESCO. ‘Artificial intelligence in education’, 31 May 2021: https://en.unesco.org/artificial-intelligence/education.
[1] When we write ‘open science’, for us this also means ‘open scholarship’. We recognise that within the humanities, the concept of ‘open science’ may not seamlessly integrate, given the diverse methodologies and practices inherent to our disciplines. The article ‘Navigating New Horizons: Openness, Blogs, and Media Studies’ by Josephine Diecke and Kai Matuszkiewicz, as part of this special section, also touches upon this perceived dichotomy.
[2] UNESCO 2021.
[3] NECS 2021.
[4] Sondervan 2021.
[5] Eve, 2014.
[6] Finch Group 2013; The Guardian 2019.
[7] Council of the EU 2023.
[8] Although not updated any longer, see for example an extensive journal list on the blog Film Studies for Free, curated by Catherine Grant: https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/p/fsff-online-film-media-studies-journals.html (accessed 31 May 2024).
[9] Moore et al 2019; Adema & Moore 2024.
[10] Fitzpatrick 2019, p. 4.
[11] UNESCO 2022; Okumne 2019.