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 open approach to research development would reduce the overall wastage. The competitive nature of bidding often precludes public sharing of bids, though, especially in the development stage, and as such, it represents one of those areas of tension between open scholarship and traditional practice.

Conclusions

Open scholarship could be a book in itself, and there are many aspects of it here that have not been covered. Citizen science is one such area, where academics are developing platforms and approaches to engage the wider public in science have seen great success. For example, projects such as iSpot allow users to take photographs of different species and ask for identification, and this can be used to plot the distribution of certain species. Open data, changes to the peer review system to make it post review, establishing online ­communities – ­all of these are fruitful areas of open scholarship. The focus here has been to demonstrate one particular aspect, that of research, and how it can be affected by open practice, but the same can be applied to teaching or public engagement or any other form of scholarly activity.

Open scholarship is not without its issues. Although privacy is ­distinct – since open scholarship is about choosing to share certain aspects and privacy is about the unpermitted invasion of those elements that one chooses not to make ­public – ­many feel uncomfortable with any form of online presence. It may be that having such an identity is now an integral part of being a scholar, so an element of compulsion underlies some of the proselytising about open scholarship. This is particularly true of learners, some of whom may have legitimate reasons for not wishing to establish an identity in the open (for example, if they have been