How do we connect the Opens: #OpenEducation and #OpenScience?
Our Connecting the Opens Leadership Series, based on interviews conducted by SPARC Europe, explores how university leaders are aligning Open Science and Open Education to strengthen institutional resilience, relevance, and public impact.
This is a wonderful and inspiring series. The first paper, A new vision for the modern university, aligns closely with my book due out May 4th Distributing knowledge: openness, equity and higher education transformation. Great to see that your series offers clear action steps. Let’s hope that the leaders you identify in your interviews will be able to take action and actually lead a transformation.
Thanks a lot @Dickh. That’s our hope as well, together with many other stakeholders who work at different levels, all of them important. Curious to read your work once published!
Thanks for posting these items. Paola. I have two comments regarding all three.
Openness will only be achieved when educators quit thinking about their work in terms of only the small segment of education that comprises ‘Higher Education.’ You’re not being open if you’re not also including all of the other learners.
You’re not being open if you publish using the CC BY license and enable others to use that free content in their proprietary products and services. Make the content always only free and able to be revised for everyone, always.
About the first, I totally agree, but it is a community effort: since we all have capacity, each of our organisations starts with those they are committed to in the first place, according to their mission, and then enlarges through community and partnership. This is a large topic of discussion; happy to make it the focus of a conversation.
I’m not sure I totally get your second point, because there are contexts in which CC BY enables much more than just commercial reuse, which, by the way, would be very much needed in some contexts. I think all licences come with specific benefits and challenges, which is why it is important to have them all and make choices knowing there might also be proprietary reuse in some cases. Happy to discuss this further as well!
I think we’re talking past each other on what “open” should guarantee. CC BY certainly allows broad reuse, but it also allows others to take openly shared work, incorporate it into proprietary products, and restrict access to the improved version. That undermines the idea of openness as something that should persist for everyone.
That’s why I point to CC BY-NC as a better baseline. It keeps the content freely accessible and reusable, preventing it from being absorbed into commercial systems that would close it off.
I also don’t find the argument that “some contexts need commercial use” very convincing in the context of openness. If something truly needs to be commercially controlled to function, then it’s not really open; it’s just using open inputs. Openness, to me, should mean that the content remains freely available and usable by anyone, not that it can be enclosed downstream.
Different licenses do have different tradeoffs, but it’s important to be clear that CC BY prioritizes maximum flexibility—including privatization—while CC BY-NC prioritizes keeping shared knowledge from being turned into something closed.
Regarding the first point I made earlier to which you responded about capacity, etc.: Capacity and starting with specific missions is a different issue from what I’m talking about. I’m not saying that every organization has to serve everyone equally. I’m questioning whether it’s accurate to call something “open” if it’s designed primarily around a single segment like higher education.
To me, openness isn’t just about growing reach over time; it’s about who is considered part of the intended audience from the start. If other learners are effectively outside the scope—whether by design, assumptions, or constraints—then we’re still operating within a bounded system, not a truly open one.
Community expansion is valuable, but it doesn’t replace the need to define openness in a way that actually includes all learners, not just extends outward from a core group.
While there have been efforts to extend openness into K–12, they haven’t seen the kind of widespread adoption that would suggest openness is naturally expanding through community and partnership.
To me, that points to the deeper issue: the model of openness that originated in U.S, Higher Education doesn’t automatically translate to other learning contexts. It’s not just a matter of scaling or time—it requires fundamentally rethinking who openness is for and how it’s designed.
So I’m not convinced that starting within Higher Ed and “expanding outward” is sufficient. If anything, the limited uptake in PreK–12 suggests that without explicitly centering all learners, especially non-U.S. learners, from the beginning, openness tends to remain bounded rather than truly inclusive.
Next item topic coming in April: Strategies and plans for connecting the Opens.