R2OS, Episode 5, with Cameron Neylon on Collective Action

In episode 5 of the Road to Open Science podcast we talk to Cameron Neylon.

David Cameron Neylon is an advocate for open access and Professor of Research Communications at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University. From 2012 – 2015 he was the Advocacy Director at the Public Library of Science.

Cameron is one of the four authors of The Panton Principles, a set of principles which were written to promote open science. They were first drafted in July 2009 at the Panton Arms pub in Cambridge and then refined by the Open Knowledge Foundation and officially launched in February 2010.

He writes about scholarly publishing in several outlets including his blog, Science in the Open. In this talk, we focused on two of his papers. In “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence, Neylon and his coauthors argue that in its current unqualified form the rhetoric of excellence is a pernicious and dangerous one that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.

In Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action Cameron uses the work of Mancur Olson on governing commons to to analyse existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. He identifies three pillars for successful governance and sustainability of such infrastructures

• transparency and community governance;
• financial sustainability, efficiency, and commitment to community needs;
• mechanisms to protect integrity, as well as manage and mitigate the risk of failures.

Links:

On Twitter: @CameronNeylon

Personal webpage: https://cameronneylon.net/