Open Research for Social Change: The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative

Social Change Symposium keynote presentation by Dr Cameron Neylon, Professor of Research Communication at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University.

The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative is a project that was born of frustration. We wanted to help senior leaders in our university to look beyond league tables and citation counts as indicators of the ‘quality’ and ‘value’ of research, and to start new conversations about why openness and diversity matter.

By combining critical humanities perspectives with cloud-based computing and data science expertise, we have been able to engage with publicly available data relating to global research communication at unprecedented scale. As we have discovered, community investments in open metadata infrastructures and recent developments in the possibilities of cloud-based computing are creating a phase-change in what we can see, as well as the questions we can ask, about the practices of global research communities.

In this talk, Dr Neylon will introduce the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative: a Humanities-led project that is engaging with the possibilities of both big and small data about the communities that make and use research. She will pay particular attention to what the data can tell us about the ways in which open research practices support social impact; and the practical strategies that our team is using to maximise the visibility, accessibility and usefulness of our work to diverse communities beyond the university.

Cameron Neylon is Professor of Research Communication at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University and co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative. His current work focusses on how the cultures of research affect and effect change in research communications and how evaluation processes affect this. He speaks regularly on issues of Open Research including Open Access publication, Open Data, and Open Source as well as the wider technical and social issues of applying the opportunities the internet brings to the practice of research. He was named as a SPARC Innovator in July 2010 for work on the Panton Principles and was a co-author of the Altmetrics manifesto and the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Professor Lucy Montgomery, co-lead of the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative, is no longer able to present at this event. We are sincerely grateful to Professor Cameron Neylon for stepping in at short notice. 

Order of Proceedings: 4:30pm - 5:30pm, followed by a networking reception and refreshments.

A recording of the presentation will be made available on the Social Change Symposium website after the event.

This event is being held as part of RMIT University's Social Change Symposium, presented in collaboration with the College of Design and Social Context and the Social Change Enabling Impact Platform.