Introducing Massively Open Online Papers (MOOPs)

Abstract

An enormous wealth of digital tools now exists for collaborating on scholarly research projects. In particular, it is now possible to collaboratively author research articles in an openly participatory and dynamic format. Here we describe and provide recommendations for a more open process of digital collaboration, and discuss the potential issues and pitfalls that come with managing large and diverse authoring communities. We summarize our personal experiences in a form of 'ten simple recommendations'. Typically, these collaborative, online projects lead to the production of what we here introduce as Massively Open Online Papers (MOOPs). We consider a MOOP to be distinct from a 'traditional' collaborative article in that it is defined by an openly participatory process, not bound within the constraints of a predefined contributors list. This is a method of organised creativity designed for the efficient generation and capture of ideas in order to produce new knowledge. Given the diversity of potential authors and projects that can be brought into this process, we do not expect that these tips will address every possible project. Rather, these tips are based on our own experiences and will be useful when different groups and communities can uptake different elements into their own workflows. We believe that creating inclusive, interdisciplinary, and dynamic environments is ultimately good for science, providing a way to exchange knowledge and ideas as a community. We hope that these Recommendations will prove useful for others who might wish to explore this space.

(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?

“…Other community‐driven practices draw on crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other types of collaborative and multisite working that can occur in a surprising number of stages of the entire research process, including research team building (e.g., Moshontz et al., 2018), design decisions (e.g., Landy et al., 2020), data collection (e.g., Paquot et al., 2022, validation of community judgements of proficiency), community augmented meta‐analyses that accumulate multiple datasets (see Many Babies Metalab, https://langcog.github.io/metalab/documentation/using_ma_data/contribute_ma), and analysis (Aczel et al., 2021, to improve analytical robustness). Even the writing process itself has attracted an open community‐driven approach (e.g., Tennant et al.’s, 2020, discussion of massively open online papers [MOOPs] that involve between 10 and 100 [partially] self‐selecting authors in an openly participatory format). With clear editorial rights and authorship assignment, we think that MOOPs may help to diversify the producers of research, though perhaps only for certain genres of academic writing such as narrative syntheses or scoping reviews.…”

Books Contain Multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing (2022 update)

“…(Kramer & Bosman, n.d.) Tools are identified by workflow phase (preparation, discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach, assessment) and short descriptions of each tool are provided. This sixth resource is included here due to its approach to identifying and discussing common traits of collaborative writing tools: while the main focus of '"Introducing Massively Open Online Papers (MOOPs)" is on 'collaboratively author[ing] research articles in an openly participatory and dynamic format' (Tennant et al, 2020), the workflows that are explored in the paper and the steps taken to identify common features to evaluate a variety of tools along a set of predefined criteria (see the paper's Table 2) that are posited as user requirements for collaborative writing platforms, are introduced here in a concise fashion that warrants further adoption and expansion to fit the needs of experimental book publishing.…”