Ending Enclosure by Copying the Commons

In the beginning (of bibliometrics), citation counts of academic research were generated to be used in annual calculations to express a research journal’s impact. Now those same citation counts make up a social graph of scholarly communication that is used to measure the research strengths of authors, the hotness of their papers, the topic prominence of their disciplines, and assess the strength of the institutions where they are employed. More troubling, the publishers of this emerging social graph are in the process of enclosing scholarship by trying to exclude the infrastructure of libraries and other independent, non-profit organizations invested in research. This paper will outline efforts currently being employed by scholarly communication librarians using platforms built by organizations such as Our Research’s UnPaywall and Wikimedia’s Wikidata Project so that the commons of scholarship can remain open. Strategies will be shared so that researchers can adapt their workflows so that they might allow their work to be copied, shared, and be found by readers widely across the commons. Scholars will be asked to make good choices.

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