Open practices make for strange bed fellows

Open approaches are now familiar in all aspects of our daily lives. With governments spearheading initiatives to make the information they hold available to all and developments such as open source software now changing the way we work, communicate and play.

Open policies are already widely in use in the academic world and all the indicators show that this is an unstoppable trend. For future Research Excellence Framework exercises, the Higher Education Funding Council for England is proposing to adopt an ‘open by default’ policy that will require all research papers to be open access and to be deposited in institutional repositories. And it is expected that the EU’s next big funding round – Horizon 2020 – will embrace open culture and practices, including by requiring high levels of openness from all those who apply for funds, as well as funding a data sharing pilot.

At its simplest, an open approach to content is about giving everyone the freedom to access information, modify it and to re-use it in any way they choose. Digital technology is making this possible and thanks to open practices and developments such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), open access and open source software, knowledge is being democratised and made available to more and more people across the planet.