Ratification of the Riga Protocol for Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community

“…to be a Mandevillean is to make a contribution to the Mandeville community…”

Bernard Mandeville Scholarship is an important and growing field in early modern history and philosophy. The idea of our initiative is to promote studies on Mandeville and other Mandevillean undertakings by upholding best scholarly practices and developing new ways of communication that can speed up the scholarly process.

During 2013-15 there have been at least six gatherings of Mandevillean scholars on different continents and different countries with truly international and amicable spirit. The idea is that people interested in Mandeville’s thinking will keep meeting in person on annual basis even when the 300th Anniversary of the Fable of the Bees is behind us. So far the communication of Mandevillean activities has been based on an informal network. We want to open up this collaboration so that the community is inclusive and also new people can join in.

In Mandeville in Latvia conference on 10.10.2015 we signed a Riga Protocol for Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community. The Riga Protocol states the following:

  • In order to become part of Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community you need to upload at least one of your scholarly items with some link to Mandeville on Zenodo Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community repository (http://zenodo.org/collection/user-mandeville)
  • Once you have become “Mandevillean” by uploading your scholarly contribution(s) to Mandeville Community on Zenodo you will be sent an email asking if you want to be on Mandeville mailing list. You will also be granted editing access to the working documents of Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community. For example, the planning of annual future meetings will be done together with Mandevilleans (i.e. those who have made any kind of contribution to the community on Zenodo).

For more details about uploading your work to Mandeville community, see https://blogs.helsinki.fi/mstolone/2015/10/08/open-bernard-mandeville-scholarship-on-zenodo/

The idea regarding the future development of the activities of Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community is to take full advantage of the best practices of open science. These include ideas about open collaborative authorship, development of new ways of scholarly publishing, open peer reviewing and other ways of advancing the scientific process and practices. We will also think about how to renew the structure of our annual meetings.

The Riga Protocol for Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community was originally signed by Andrea Branchi (The American University of Rome), Elena Muceni (University of Geneva), Matteo Revolti (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt), Atis Zakatistovs (Riga Business School), Mauro Simonazzi (Università degli Studi di Camerino), Heikki Haara (University of Helsinki), Joaquim Braga (University of Coimbra), Inese Suija Markova (Institute for Environmental Solutions), Janis Frisvalds, and Mikko Tolonen (University of Helsinki).

Since the Mandeville in Latvia conference was meant as a smaller meeting and we have had over 50 scholars participating in Mandeville meetings over the two last years (and most likely many more who have not yet been able to join us), we ask for people now to ratify the Riga Protocol for Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community. The ratification is done simply by filling your name and affiliation to the following questionnaire:

http://goo.gl/forms/ABmVbAaHxc

The ratification means that you agree with the idea of Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community (to be a Mandevillean is to make a contribution to the Mandeville community) and that you intend to make such a contribution. Of course, you will only become a Mandevillean when you have contributed to the community by uploading it on Zenodo (NB! It can be any form of scholarly contribution, even a blog post like this will do). We understand that especially students do not yet necessarily have published articles and thus cannot archive pre-prints of them. Thus, we underline that any form of research contribution will do, in our thinking research data is also crucial and not just the end-products in the form of journal publications. Also those people who have not yet worked on Mandeville are free to sign the ratification, if you feel that there is a possibility that you might work on Mandeville in the future. Also, if you want to support our open science principles, but you do not work on anything related to Mandeville, feel free to sign the ratification “in spirit” (note this next to your name).

The deadline for the ratification of the Riga Protocol is 15. November 2015. After that we will upload this document including the names of the people who have ratified the Riga Protocol for Open Bernard Mandeville Scholarship Community on Zenodo.

Please circulate this message as widely as possible among the Mandeville community, as well as on other discussion forums. After all, we are all potential Mandevilleans, if you think about it.

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