OSC/e Meetup: The Publishing Trap game

We want to start this Academic Year with an informal meetup to play a board game the Publishing Trap. The Publishing Trap is an open-source game from the UK Copyright Literacy team that allows participants to explore the impact of scholarly communications choices and discuss the role of open access in research by following the lives of four researchers – from doctoral research to their academic legacies. The game is designed to be played by up to 4 teams with around 4 people per team. Each team chooses to play as one of the designed characters and needs to make collective decisions as the game progresses. The game will take around 1.5 hours to play from beginning to end, although the time will depend on the number of players, the conversations the game sparks, and the level of prior knowledge that participants have. During the game, we will also have a drink and a borrel together.

Aim of the game

The Publishing Trap is a game about research dissemination and scholarly communication. The game follows the academic career of four characters who at each stage in their career, from PhD submission, through to Professorship, are presented with a series of scenarios about which they have to make choices. The characters make decisions about how to disseminate their research at conferences, in academic journals and in monographs or textbooks. Ultimately the game helps researchers to understand how money, intellectual property rights, and both open and closed publishing models affect the dissemination and impact of their research. Through playing the game in teams, players get to discuss the impact of each character’s choices. The game ends at the end of the character’s life when players see the consequences of the choices they have made in terms of money, knowledge ad impact.