InfoDoc MicroVeille – Veille dédiée aux Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques // Collecting and Sharing research papers in Library and Information science ISSN 2429-3938

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

Posted on 17 avril 2026 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

Emerging Forms of Open Research in Social/Cultural Anthropology

Posted on 17 avril 2026 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

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

Posted on 17 avril 2026 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

Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

Posted on 17 avril 2026 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

Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research

Posted on 17 avril 2026 by Hans Dillaerts

Authors : Graham Jensen, Sajib Ghosh, Archie To, Ray Siemens

Academic journals, institutional repositories, and emerging digital technologies have played a crucial role in providing access to scholarship. However, free and unfettered access to research is not a given—nor are the digital infrastructures through which open research is published and made accessible immune to commercial enclosure or obsolescence. The threat of “vanishing” digital publications also remains a very real threat, and open-access and humanities and social sciences (HSS) journals are particularly at risk of disappearing. In this paper, we aim to address the related issues of access to, and preservation of, HSS research by examining our own experiments with open methods and tools for the (re)publication of open-access scholarship via open infrastructure. As part of this process of self-examination, we focus on one infrastructural initiative that is equipped to support this work: the Canadian-based HSS Commons.

In the process, we also invite consideration of how low-budget, DIY-style innovation and experimentation in the realm of digital research software constitute valid, crucial forms of humanistic intervention and activity. To do so, we discuss a project that emerged from the HSS Commons’ collaborative partnership with Iter Canada: a large-scale migration of open-access back issues from scholarly journals or book series operated by Iter.

In conclusion, we reflect on the larger significance, potential wider application, and limitations of such interventions. Indeed, while there are many possible benefits to the workflow we developed—which resulted in the publication of over 6,000 publications in the HSS Commons repository, and which we hope will serve as a model for other groups or journals interested in backing up and increasing the discoverability of their own research—our work on this project also highlighted the many methodological, infrastructural, and institutional challenges that still face those who may be interested in pursuing open scholarship of this kind.

URL : Open Infrastructure and the Threat of “Vanishing” Journals: Leveraging Open Knowledge Commons, Open Source Software, and DIY Solutions to Preserve Humanities and Social Sciences Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7860

Open for Debate: Situating Open Research for the Humanities in a Neoliberal Setting

Posted on 17 avril 2026 by Hans Dillaerts

Author : Beatriz Barrocas Ferreira

Open research has been widely promoted as a means of democratising knowledge, yet its uptake in the humanities has remained limited and frequently marked by ambivalence. In the context of growing institutional investment in open research, this article interrogates what openness entails for the humanities within a research setting increasingly shaped by neoliberal rationalities.

While often framed as a democratising force, the implementation of open research policies seems to have largely aligned with market-oriented imperatives, emphasising transparency, efficiency, and economic return.

The article argues that the friction between open research and the humanities arises not from an aversion to openness per se, but from the instrumentalization of open research and its imposition as a universalising, science-centric framework that fails to accommodate the pluralistic dimensions of humanistic research. Rather than dismissing openness, the article calls for a reimagining of open research grounded in pluralism, situated ethics, and disciplinary specificity.

URL : Open for Debate: Situating Open Research for the Humanities in a Neoliberal Setting

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7850