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 to suggest that although universities are not opposed to change, their own identity is deeply associated with certain traditions, which are reinforced through ‘strategies that coerce individuals to play by the rules’ and the creation of certain myths.

Bringing these strands together, we can establish a picture of the open scholar and how their identity relates to practice. The notion of crowd symbols from national identity has an equivalence with central tenets of disciplinary belief, be these iconic papers or methods. As a member of an academic discipline these crowd symbols help define identity. However, as Dennen points out, blogging, and by extension other forms of online identity, have their own social norms, which could be seen as a set of competing crowd symbols. The online identity may also provide a route to ­re-​­establishing core academic values such as autonomy.

Open scholars are thus in a rather schizophrenic position. They can occupy two different domains, which may have competing values. For example, the open scholarship community places a precedent on immediacy, sharing small outputs and working through ideas in the open. The traditional disciplinary community places more value on considered, larger outputs and not releasing these until late in the research process. For open scholars the intersection of these sometimes competing social norms can create tension.

By way of analogy, we can think of open scholars as any group in a nation that has a strong local identity which may be at odds with their national one. This can be seen with mountain dwellers, who have a strong affinity with other mountain folk, as well as with their own nation. Analysing those who live in the Swiss Alps, Debarbieux and Rudaz (2008) found that ‘mountain people throughout the ­world – ­beyond their cultural, religious or political ­differences – easily feel at one’ and that ‘A mountain farmer