Accelerating cultural change with collective action: A Project Free Our Knowledge update
Academia functions like a ‘tragedy of the commons’ dilemma: Open Science practices have the potential to benefit the entire research community (and beyond), but remain underutilised due to incentive structures that prioritise novelty over reliability and reward publications in high-impact journals. In recent years, ‘conditional pledge’ platforms (e.g., Kickstarter, Collaction) have been increasingly used to tackle comparable collective action problems, but this concept remains to be implemented within academia. Here, I will present Project Free Our Knowledge, a new platform that aims to overcome cultural inertia by organising the collective adoption of open and reproducible research practices. I’ll give a quick background to the project, introduce some new campaigns that have been posted in the past year, and invite conference attendees to propose additional campaigns for the future.
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qF8c5-xRU9zOXTH8ZqicxhP6TAceYlymT5HUFgPg7uE/edit?usp=sharing