Scarcity and Agency in Higher Education

In his keynote talk for RailsConf2021, David Hansson criticized the scarcity model of open sourcing. This is the model of both Gates and Stallman (Hansson, 2021) which operates on the idea that code must be licensed in order to protect the general coding world against freeloaders or stolen code.  This model is a scarcity model, and Hansson pointed out that there is no such thing as scarcity with open sourcing.  There is no limited amount of code, no boundaries for its use.  The tragedy of the commons is a misappropriated metaphor because in the commons, there is a scarcity of resources so there must be limitations and regulations in order to guide public use.  But this is not the case with open sourcing.  In fact, the result of this misapplication is that those engaged in start-ups who are working overtime for a decade to develop and guard code suffer from burnout, lose a sense of freedom and creativity, and give over their quality of life to extrinsic motivation.

The Rails project, Hansson pointed out, was the opposite experience for him.  The original MIT license was an altruistic, utopian anti-license.  Simply put, it said, “Do what you want, do as you please (just don’t sue).”  To Hansson, working on the Rails project involved doing work without anyone telling him what to do.  It was born out of a debt to the open source community that had trained him up and given him opportunities.  His development of Rails was “a truly authentic choice.”  In the coding world, there is an inverse relationship between scarcity and agency. The more a model of scarcity predominates the field, the less agency people have to create and use code.  

This may seem a stretch to apply Hansson’s critique of the scarcity model to higher education, but the tensions are similar.  The more scarcity predominates, the less agency scholars have to pursue their research in open, authentic ways.  Professors whose altruistic goals may be to contribute to greater knowledge to the world through open scholarship and newer publication routes made possible through the internet are instead driven by the pressures of advancement in academia towards less authentic goals. The scarcity in academia is a scarcity of prestige and publication.  This is a pre-internet model where there were fewer scholarly journals and publication and purchase did create some amount of scarcity.  Only the best of the best could get published.  From this came a competitive university hierarchy system where the top scholars were those with the most elite publications in the main journals for a given discipline.  With the internet, there are more journals and more realistic means of sharing and accessing knowledge, more means of impact, but academics are holding on to a model of elitism.  The internet also brings new ways of quantifying elitism through citation counts.  Adding these as evaluation tools to the already problematic Journal Impact Factor, we have a continuing system of researchers driven by extrinsic motivation to achieve academic survival through rank advancement process which focus on valuing what we can measure instead of measuring what we authentically value as researchers (Agate et al., 2017).

What is the Rails equivalent in higher education?  How do we get out from under the proverbial RPT sword as researchers?  Open scholarship in its various forms may be part of this solution. However, in the current system, open scholarship does not “count” towards rank advancement in the same way that traditional publishing does.  In response to Hansson’s critique and drawing on the DORA Declaration (2014), the Leiden Manifesto (2015), and the work of HuMetrics (2017), here are some recommendations that all the groups agree upon for changing the system:

• Place value on quality of research, not quantity of citations or JIF.
• Rather than operating out of fear of free-loading professors, develop communities of practice where researchers contribute authentically to a body of knowledge and receive mentorship and evaluation by experts in the field.  
• Accept a wide range of publication types, including open scholarship, as proof of contribution and impact. Reject a scarcity model of education.

If academia’s evaluation system included these basic principles, scholars would not have to spend the formative years of their scholarship with their eyes focused on antiquated metrics until they can do what they intrinsically want to do.  A shift toward open scholarship could be a shift toward more agential research practice and an increase in both quality and impact.  

References

Agate, N., Kennison, R., Konkiel, S., Long, C., Rhody, J., & Sacchi, S. (2017). HuMetricsHSS: towards value-based indicators in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Bladek, M. (2014). DORA: San Francisco declaration on research assessment (May 2013). College & Research Libraries News, 75(4), 191-196.

Hansson, D. (2021, December 13).  “I won't let you pay me for my open source.”  HEY World.  https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-won-t-let-you-pay-me-for-my-open-source-d7cf4568

Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L. et al. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520, 429–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a