Open source scholarship

Today’s cover story in Times Higher Education is about the concept of the ‘citizen scientist’ – a term which consciously parallels the emergence of the ‘citizen journalist’ .  The implication, then, is that just as those working for the mainstream press need to collaborate with citizen journalists, in an increasingly connected world academic researchers will need to collaborate with citizen scientists.  Interestingly, the article doesn’t mention open-source concepts, and it does make much of examples which have been around for many years longer than the Internet, but nevertheless there is an issue of how scientific research could be changing to adapt to an environment where many different people can participate as peers