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 With regards to academic identity, Henkel (2005) identifies a number of significant attributes, with autonomy important amongst these, highlighting that ‘autonomy is integrally related to academic identity.’ Changes in the structure of higher education has meant that the department an individual belongs to is now not as central to their identity as it once was. Henkel argues, ‘The department is now only one, and not necessarily the most secure or important, focus of academic activity and identification.’ Becher (1989) stresses the importance of disciplines in academic identity, arguing that academia can be seen as comprising distinctive ‘tribes’, with their territory established through rules and conventions as significant as the knowledge domain itself.

Turning to aspects of open scholarship, blogs probably represent the most established form. Ewins (2005) uses the postmodern term ‘multiphrenic’ to describe the multiple identities that authors project, with perhaps a different one for their discipline, their campus based persona and their online persona. It is false to think of any of these as a ‘true’ identity; they project different aspects of the individual, which are related to the social norms of that context. Dennen (2009) points out that at the genesis of a blog, the academic must make decisions about that identity: What type of tone will the blog adopt? What topics will it cover? How much of the author’s personal life should be revealed? She suggests that, just as on campus there exists a set of social norms, so it is online, and the blogger responds to these. These identity norms spread across the highly connected blogosphere ‘based on a viral movement of individual actions across blogs.’

These new identities can be in conflict with traditional ones, as Costa (2013) argues, stating, ‘Higher education institutions are more likely to encourage conventional forms of publication than innovative approaches to research communication.’ She goes on