Towards a Competence Framework for Open Scholars: Acknowledging the Dearth of Epistemic Competences

This study addresses competences of the Open Scholar. It draws on a theoretical framework reaching out to sustainability education, responsibility and activity theory to describe competences. Competences of the Open Scholar are understood within the context of Higher Education institutions’ three missions: teaching, research and service to the community. The systematic literature review of three key concepts, Open Educator, Open Researcher and Open Scholar performed on a total of 811 articles between 2011 and 2023 as well as the content analysis performed on 10 competence frameworks highlight a dearth in epistemic competences. To fill this gap, the study raises awareness of the importance of initiating the development of scholars’ capabilities in areas that can enable them to ask questions at the level of purpose and paradigm. Capabilities to address these deeper levels are presented as a way of enhancing the responsibility of scholars. Responsibility is framed in-line with its Latin root, respondere, i.e., providing a response and drawing on a semantics of care, respect and concern (instead of the foregrounded framing of responsibility in terms of subjectivity, power and causality). Furthermore, identifying not-yetness and addressing uncertainty are presented as key competences of the Open Scholar.