For decades there has been pressure on those working in academia to engage more seriously with the publics they serve (Woodward 2009). Steps have been taken in this direction, see the rise of the public humanities as a movement (Wikipedia n.d.)—the international transition from closed, for-cost publishing to open access research (Suber 2012) and the establishment of public engagement priorities (Gibson 2009). Circumstances and opportunities for academic collaboration with wider communities have only improved with the rise of networked technologies and the resultant de-centering of authority in regard to who is considered to be an expert on any given subject. Narrowing down to the humanities, in particular, the development and international establishment of digital humanities (DH) as a robust and vibrant field of study has opened further doors; those in DH often have the proclivity, skills, and aptitude for working with colleagues across disciplines and outside of traditional academic institutions (Brown 2016). The prerequisites are in place for socially creating knowledge, collaborating across groups, and engaging with publics in more comprehensive and sustained ways. In what ways are academics and those who are academic-aligned taking up this form of more open, and more social, scholarship?

1. book history
2. digital humanities
3. electronic text

Original publication: Arbuckle, Alyssa, Luis Meneses, and Ray Siemens. “Introduction, Open Scholarship in Action.” Proceedings from the January 2019 INKE Meeting, Understanding and Enacting Open Scholarship, special issue of POP! Public. Open. Participatory, no. 1, 2019, http://doi.org/10.21810/pop.2019.001. 4pp.