Alex Fink says:

Open Source Scholarship is a massive attitude and orientation change for scholars. What’s it really about, in my mind? It is about transforming a history in academia of using secrecy, privacy, and private ownership of ideas into one of shared, participatory, co-designed and developed, public, and free work. It is about – especially because I’m at a public institution – helping to build a commons, while simultaneously attempting to dismantle the histories of oppression that knowledge generated in universities has been used to promote and the limited knowledge systems we’ve propagated. Open source scholarship is a radical transformation in the universities’ relationship with ideas, in scholars’ relationships with students and colleagues, in relationships with communities. It is an explosion of the concept of “inside” and “outside”, of “expert” and “lay”, of privileged knowledge and everyday knowledge. Whether or not academics and universities want it, this is the coming world. More and more people will be empowered to use and conduct research, it will be available and evaluated more broadly, and the state of knowledge will be opened up in new ways we can’t yet even predict.

via http://www.hastac.org/blogs/alexanderjfink/2013/11/16/open-source-scholarship-github-academics-next-steps