It has been a busy past few months for the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Launched in 2018, CREOS responds to the need for credible research to inform efforts for a more equitable and open scholarly ecosystem. Here are just a few examples of the center’s recent activities.
External Advisory Committee Launched
The committee will provide expertise and advice to help shape the research direction of CREOS, help identify potential funders and partners, and provide feedback on the center’s direction, project ideas, and priorities. Members include Leslie Chan, associate professor in the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the director of the Knowledge Equity Lab; Erin McKiernan, neuroscientist and community manager for the Open Funders Research Group at SPARC; Tressie McMillan Cottom, associate professor in the iSchool at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and 2020 MacArthur Fellow; Safiya Noble, associate professor at UCLA, and co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry; Anasuya Sengupta, co-founder and co-director of Whose Knowledge?; and Geeta Swamy, associate vice president for research, Duke University, and vice dean for Scientific Integrity at Duke’s School of Medicine. Read more about them at libraries.mit.edu/creos.
Corey Johnson, Suman Maity, Ashley Thomas
Welcoming Postdocs
In September, three postdoctoral associates started two-year terms as part of a program funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Corey Johnson, who received a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, will work with Stephanie Frampton, associate professor of literature, on advancing equity and accessibility in archives and special collections. Suman Maity, who received a PhD in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, will work with Professor Roger Levy of Brain and Cognitive Sciences on computational social science for scholarly communications and open and equitable scholarship. Ashley Thomas, who holds a PhD in cognitive science from the University of California, Irvine, will work with Rebecca Saxe, John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, on tools for rigorous and reproducible research.
New Grant Funding
CREOS has received an IMLS National Leadership Grant for the project Community Tracking Indicators for Open and Inclusive Scholarship. The team will create measures based on open bibliometric data, web and social-media mining, and community input. These indicators will support the evaluation of large-scale interventions, benchmark comparisons, and monitor the health of the scholarly information ecosystem over time. The indicators will go beyond “overall impact” measures to advance the understanding of who is — and who is not — participating in open scholarship.
