An Ongoing Experiment: Public Scholarly Annotation

Background stories

I value Open Scholarship and have been practicing it for years – both in terms of doing it and learning to do it. Stian Haklev, an OER and Open Access champion, introduced me to this idea. He built a wiki-based workflow system, named researchr, and convinced a few OISE friends, including Cresencia Fong and Alisa Acosta, to share our annotations publicly, in a well-organized manner. For us, the benefits of using researchr are obvious: the system scaffolds the scholarly process of reading and annotating articles, as well as summarizing and organizing our notes. Its openness adds another important piece that’s a bit murkier. What does it mean to share out annotations publicly – to academics who annotate, to authors of an annotated article, and to academia?