Hi! Thanks for dropping by :)
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.
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.
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.
This website was built using Beautiful Jekkyl by Dean Attali, forked and edited by Cooper Smout