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Permapublishing: Toward Sustainable Publishing Practices

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Antoine Fauchié

The sustainability of publishing systems goes far beyond the production of printed books, and there is now an urgent need to examine digital production methods, from software to the technical infrastructures used to disseminate knowledge. Despite a lack of consideration for the durability of these publishing modes, the tools and other technical workings can be rethought to take into account the dimensions of longevity and sobriety.

As a concept and a community of practice, permacomputing allows us to explore radical initiatives in the use of computing in a limited context. Its extension into the field of publishing, permapublishing, is an opportunity to identify and analyze sustainable publishing modes that can be shared, hijacked or extended, through the elaboration of three structuring principles: decoupling, deprecation and empowerment.

URL : Permapublishing: Toward Sustainable Publishing Practices

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29732

EN

Un/Sustainable Peer Review and Generative AI: Ethical Gaps, Editorial Acceleration, and the Whitewashing of Technological Solutionism

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Angel Gord, Chris H. Gray, Ana Rodrígue, Elías Said-Hung, Raúl Tabaré

Generative AI in peer review raises ethical and environmental concerns and risks deepening existing inequities in scholarly publishing. Celebrated gains in speed often mask declines in quality and accountability.

Training and deploying large models impose environmental costs. In editorial workflows, AI can privilege technical fixes over structural reform, and evidence shows it reproduces human biases while being cast as neutral. We call for a renewed commitment to open-science principles anchored in human oversight, deep sustainability, and broader justice.

The paper concludes by interrogating sustainability’s absence from green-economy debates and mapping the values likely to shape the future of peer review.

URL : Un/Sustainable Peer Review and Generative AI: Ethical Gaps, Editorial Acceleration, and the Whitewashing of Technological Solutionism

DOI : https://doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE29731

EN

The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : CandiCe Fillaud, ChériFa BoukaCem-Zeghmouri, Yutong Fei, Valentine FaVel-kapoian

This paper presents a thematic, taxonomy-based analysis that reveals a turn by French HSS (Humanities and Social Sciences) scholars towards criticism of the French national Open Science policy.

By examining their argumentation, we better understand how far official discourse on OS fails to take into account the specificities of HSS disciplines, methodologies, and research practices. To achieve this, we developed a 5-step research design: (1) compilation of a corpus of peer-reviewed papers critical of the national Open Science policy, (2) extraction of quotations containing arguments justifying the criticism, (3) Top-Down indexing of these arguments; (4) construction of a Bottom-Up taxonomy of researchers’ criticisms of Open Science based on an iterative thematic analysis of their arguments, and (5) cross-referencing the two taxonomies.

Our results show that criticism of Open Science accompanied the publication of the two national plans, in 2018 and 2021. The Bottom-Up taxonomy shows that the largest share of the criticism expressed by researchers focuses on Open Research Data, and that this facet cuts across argument categories to the greatest degree, representing the majority of legal/ethical (91.7%), praxis-based (70.0%), and epistemological (68.2%) arguments.

The paper’s original contribution lies in the dialogue it raises about a broader view of Open Science when it comes to HSS. It also provides unprecedented analysis of the categories of argument employed by French HSS scholars to justify their criticism of national French Open Science policy.

URL : The French HSS Community Speaks Out on Open Science: A Top-Down and Bottom-Up Taxonomy Approach

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7835

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Open at the Level of (Para)text: Critical Intertextuality and Discursive Notation as Open Research Practices in the Humanities

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Jenni Adams

This article contends that open research practices and principles are embedded in humanities research paradigms in ways that are not currently visible within either the open science–dominated framework of open research or the discourse of open qualitative research that is emerging as its corrective.

Focusing on practices around citation (here framed as critical intertextuality) and discursive notation, I explore the ways in which these everyday practices of humanities discourse manifest forms of openness that should be more fully recognized within the discourse of open research.

Occurring at a time when efforts to measure, incentivize, and mandate open research at institutional, funder, journal, and research assessment levels risk delegitimizing forms of inquiry that lie outside existing frameworks, such reconsiderations of unrecognized practices of openness in the humanities are both crucial and timely.

URL : Open at the Level of (Para)text: Critical Intertextuality and Discursive Notation as Open Research Practices in the Humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7845

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Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Timothy Elfenbein, Marcel LaFlamme, Andrew S. Hoffman

This article explores some current efforts to reconfigure research practices in the field of social/cultural anthropology, in ways that intersect with the open research movement but cannot be reduced to its local implementation.

We highlight three initiatives—the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), Experimental Methods for Ethnographic Research, Gathering, and Exchange (EMERGE), and xcol: An Ethnographic Inventory—seeking to make knowledge practices that are presently tacit or invisible in published research outputs more explicit and available for critical reflection.

Drawing on edited excerpts from unstructured interviews and a group discussion with participants from the three projects, we find that the primary driver for these efforts is a desire to increase the generativity of research materials, rather than regarding openness as a means to ensure reliability or reproducibility.

While directed at different steps of the knowledge production process, all three initiatives invite researchers to engage with some version of « light structure » for documentation, which aims to enable comparison and iteration while respecting fidelity to the source material. These findings offer insight into a distinctively anthropological culture of openness that prioritizes the proliferation of interpretations over the corroboration of fact.

URL : Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.8085

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“Well, Parts of Linguistics Is Open…”: Insights into Linguists’ Diverse Understandings of Open Science

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Elen Le Foll

Broadly defined as the study of language, linguistics is a diverse field spanning many disciplines. Recent studies on the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) in linguistics (e.g. Isbell et al. 2022) suggest that it suffers from many of the same issues that triggered the replication crisis in psychology (see e.g. Sönning and Werner 2021). While surveys have indicated that linguists are generally in favour of Open Science/Scholarship (OS), there appears to be a “a misalignment between the attitude to and the adoption of OS practices” (Liu and de Cat 2024, 64).

The present study aims to gain insights into this misalignment by exploring linguists’ understanding of what constitutes OS and of the specificities of linguistic research that (can) affect its applicability to (subdisciplines of) linguistics. To this end, the study draws on the results of an anonymous, small-scale survey and the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with 26 linguists based in Northern Europe, representing all career stages, and a wide range of subdisciplines within linguistics.

The results reveal diverse understandings of OS among linguists. While some focus on the accessibility of research (for both academics and the wider public), others prioritise the sharing of data, materials, and code to promote transparency, reproducibility, and replicability. The latter group also emphasises the importance of OS principles and values like rigour, fairness, and collaboration. Linguists report learning about OS through conferences, workshops, library services, and social media but, most importantly, in personal interactions with other researchers, thus making much of this knowledge network-dependent.

The interviewees highlight several challenges and considerations that they believe need to be addressed when applying OS to linguistics. These include ethical and legal issues concerning data sharing, the high inter-person variability inherent to many linguistic studies, the need for (more) funding for open-access monographs, and for training in data management and statistical methods.

URL : “Well, Parts of Linguistics Is Open…”: Insights into Linguists’ Diverse Understandings of Open Science

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7974

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Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Rebekka Kiesewetter

Open access (OA) publishing has often been framed through democratization narratives that shape how openness is understood in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). This article examines these narratives and critiques how they are bound up with discourses that equate openness with technological, legal, or financial access to research outputs.

In doing so, they abstract openness from the epistemic, social, and affective conditions under which scholarly knowledge is produced, evaluated, and experienced. In their mainstream, policy‑ and funder‑driven forms, these discourses—and the technocratic model of openness they promote—have become entangled with prestige regimes that privilege measurable outputs, reward efficiency, and marginalize forms of scholarly labor that resist quantification. As OA publishing becomes increasingly embedded within performance‑driven research cultures, HSS scholars often experience it less as an ethical or intellectual commitment than as an administrative obligation.

Even those critical of this evolution frequently lack the time, resources, or institutional support to pursue alternatives. In response, the article foregrounds OA practices emerging from feminist, decolonial, and post‑hegemonic traditions as democratic interventions into the very conditions of scholarly work. Through analysis of three publishing initiatives—Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl Herbarium (Méndez Cota 2023), the “Open Science Manifesto” (OCSDNet 2017), and “editing otherwise” (Kiesewetter 2024a, b)—it proposes that OA publishing can become a terrain of democratization through situated, collective experimentation with how knowledge is recognized, shared, and lived. Here, openness is not a technical fix or compliance measure but a practical insistence that scholarship can be done differently.

URL : Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7944