Katherine Pandora

April 8, 2021

Katherine Pandora is an Associate Professor of History of Science for the Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She researches and teaches about science in the public sphere from several different vantage points: studying the relations between politics and the scientific enterprise as they play out in research settings and cultural arenas; exploring how natural history has served as an “intellectual commons” for contestations by both the public and professionals about the nature of scientific authority; and by taking science in popular culture seriously, in order to better understand how scientific knowledge circulates “in the vernacular.” She is the author of open article Science in the everyday world: Why perspectives from the history of science matter.   

 I was pulled into the open access domain in the early 2000s...

. . . when open access digital archives emerged. I was particularly excited when film archivist Rick Prelinger began donating items from his massive stockpile of “ephemeral films” (made for educational, advertising, industrial, and government purposes) to the Internet Archive in 2001. In 1996 I’d been thrilled when he made small groups of titles from his private collection publicly available as Our Secret Century: The Darker Side of the American Dream on cd-roms (a technology that I found far superior to vhs tape) -- however, they were still frustratingly beyond my reach due to the cost. It was a stunning turn of events when just a few years later thousands of these films became openly accessible as part of the Prelinger Archive.   

In the previous decade I had no idea that I would be among the last cohort of doctoral students who would expect primary source historical research to be conducted almost solely at physical archives that were restricted to a small number of scholars who were only able to access materials under stiff constraints -- or that, as a new professor, I would be re-training myself to make use of a more expansive and continually-morphing historical research ecosystem that had emerged due to digitization, the spread of the Internet, and the rapid growth of the world wide web, and which would make open access archives possible.   

 The most direct way I've participated in open access scholarship to date is by...

. . . making as much of my research openly accessible as possible by placing it in the SHAREOK repository (thanks to the guidance and assistance of OU Libraries’ Office of Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication). Where before this research faced inward toward the library shelves and reserved only for those who had subscription access, now it faces outward toward the public world. Because of the university’s open access repository, anyone can find my research for any number of reasons -- even due to simple curiosity about, say, the underlying issues of encountering science in our everyday worlds (which you can find here) or what “the children’s republic of science” looked like in the early 19th-century U.S. (which you can find here). Not everything that I think should be in the repository is currently available: there are some publishers who have refused or ignored my requests. Engaging in open access options has made me more keenly aware of the ethical ramifications of our current publishing norms, and rather than signing away the rights to my own (publicly-funded) research without question as I have done before, in the future I’m instead going to first ask for open access accommodations, through procedures that OU Libraries has already set in place.   

 My next open access challenge is to develop a publication model for a born-digital version of a long-standing book project...

. . . I’ve been planning on science and popular culture, based on my more than twenty years of research and teaching on this topic. One of the drawbacks to staying with a conventional print format is that books that are designed as introductions to content, issues, and methods in a topic area simply cost too much today, with prices attuned to what the research library market will bear rather than having real-world people’s budgets in mind. But price considerations aren’t the only ones driving my decision to try something different. I’ve been frustrated for some time that many academics see the digital sphere in such conservative terms, content primarily to use it as a space to replicate legacy print formats as closely as possible rather than reimagining what “an article” or “a book” can be, particularly when approached as open access projects. The lack of incentives to move beyond standardized modes -- administrators typically state that they favor innovation and risk-taking, but they reliably reward efforts that remain within status quo parameters -- also inhibits experimentation. Publication options that support improvisational experimentation do exist, and the one I’ll be working with is an open source multimedia platform named Scalar, a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, that can handle custom-designed applications, incorporate recursive and non-linear formats, and that allows for collaborative authoring and embedding reader commentary (for examples, see their showcase). Beyond exploring what new kinds of learning environments new modes of publication can encourage, I remain committed to open access options because they encourage us to think differently about how we do historical research, who we do it with, and why.