La crédibilité des matériaux ethnographiques face au mouvement d’ouverture des données de la recherche

Auteur.ices/Authors : Alix Levain, Florence Revelin, Anne-Gaëlle Beurier, Marianne Noël

Les politiques d’ouverture des données de la recherche s’appuient sur des arguments de transparence, d’innovation et de démocratisation des savoirs. Cet article vise à rendre intelligibles leurs implications pour les communautés travaillant à partir de données ethnographiques, confrontées à une transformation des critères de reconnaissance de la crédibilité des savoirs qu’elles produisent.

Alors que les chercheur·e·s qui pratiquent l’ethnographie sont engagé·e·s dans des formes situées de partage des matériaux avec les pair·e·s, les autres disciplines et les « communautés sources », le renforcement du contrôle externe sur les conditions dans lesquelles ce partage s’effectue déstabilise les économies de la crédibilité qui structurent ces pratiques.

Davantage qu’une réticence au processus d’ouverture, le retrait des ethnographes du mouvement apparaît au terme de notre analyse comme résultant à la fois de l’existence d’écologies alternatives des matériaux empiriques et d’une éthique des marges incorporée dans des normes professionnelles souvent implicites.

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rac.30291

Negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods: a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research

Authors : Simon West, Caroline Schill

Methods are often thought of as neutral tools that researchers can pick up and use to learn about a reality ‘out there.’ Motivated by growing recognition of complexity, there have been widespread calls to mix methods, both within and across disciplines, to generate richer scientific understandings and more effective policy interventions.

However, bringing methods together often reveals their tacit, inherently contestable, and sometimes directly opposing assumptions about reality and how it can and should be known.

There are consequently growing efforts to identify the competencies necessary to work with multiple methods effectively. We identify the ability to recognise and negotiate the ethical-political dimensions of research methods as a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research, particularly for researchers addressing societal challenges in fields like environment, health and education.

We describe these ethical-political dimensions by drawing on our experiences developing an ethics application for a transdisciplinary sustainability science project that brings together the photovoice method and controlled behavioural experiments.

The first dimension is that different methods and methodological approaches generate their own ethical standards guiding interactions between researchers and participants that may contradict each other.

The second is that these differing ethical standards are directly linked to the variable effects that methods have in wider society (both in terms of their enactment in the moment and the knowledge generated), raising more political questions about the kinds of realities that researchers are contributing to through their chosen methods.

We identify the practices that helped us—as two researchers using different methodological approaches—to productively explore these dimensions and enrich our collaborative work.

We conclude with pointers for evaluating the ethical-political rigour of mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research, and discuss how such rigour might be supported in research projects, graduate training programmes and research organisations.

URL : Negotiating the ethical-political dimensions of research methods: a key competency in mixed methods, inter- and transdisciplinary, and co-production research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01297-z

L’ouverture des matériaux de recherche ethnographiques en question

Auteur-e-s/Authors : Florence Revelin, Alix Levain, Morgane Mignon, Marianne Noel, Betty Queffelec, Pascal Raux, Hervé Squividant

Le mouvement d’ouverture des données scientifiques constitue, pour les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS), un défi à la fois épistémologique, juridique, éthique et technique. Il se manifeste par des normes et injonctions multiples vis-à-vis des communautés de recherche, qui peinent à s’y conformer et à se saisir des instruments mis à leur disposition.

Le projet PARDOQ vise à rendre intelligibles les implications complexes de ce mouvement pour les communautés travaillant à partir de données qualitatives (ethnographiques), à travers l’analyse de l’expérience de chercheuses et chercheurs confronté.e.s à la tension entre partage et protection des données ethnographiques, en prenant appui d’une part sur une étude de cas (le programme de recherche interdisciplinaire Parchemins) et d’autre part sur une enquête auprès de chercheurs.euses pratiquant l’ethnographie et de membres de réseaux scientifiques, techniques et juridiques d’appui et à la recherche.

URL : L’ouverture des matériaux de recherche ethnographiques en question

Original location : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03238067

TEI Models for the Publication of Social Sciences and Humanities Journals: Opportunities, Challenges, and First Steps Toward a Standardized Workflow

Authors : Anne Baillot, Julie Giovacchini

The TEI Guidelines are developed and curated by a community whose main purpose is to standardize the encoding of primary sources relevant for humanities research and teaching. But other communities are also working with TEI-based publication formats.

The first goal of this paper is to raise awareness of the importance of TEI-based scholarly publishing as we know it today.

The second goal is to contribute to a reflection on the development of a TEI customization that would cover the whole authoring-reviewing-publishing workflow and guarantee archiving options that are as solid for journal publications as what we now have for primary sources published in TEI.

URL : TEI Models for the Publication of Social Sciences and Humanities Journals: Opportunities, Challenges, and First Steps Toward a Standardized Workflow

DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/jtei.3419

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

Authors : Maciej Maryl, Marta Błaszczyńska, Agnieszka Szulińska, Paweł Rams

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers.

This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres.

This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies.

They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

URL : The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

DOI : https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.26545.1

‘Communists of Knowledge’? A case for the implementation of ‘radical open access’ in the humanities and social sciences

Author : Eleanor Masterman

Open access (OA) has widely been touted as a ‘radical’ alternative to the traditional scholarly publishing system, which has faced heavy criticism in the last twenty years for its oligopolistic market and high profit margins.

Yet, this dissertation argues that – especially in scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing – OA under the ‘author-pays’ model has largely become part of that system, as another revenue stream for the largest commercial publishers.

My study contributes to a growing body of literature that seeks instead to re-politicise OA for the humanities and social sciences (HSS), a sector where the topic is still marked by discussion and debate, by critiquing its subordinance to market logic.

Adopting an explicitly political definition of ‘radical’, this study attempts to answer the question ‘Could open access facilitate a radical approach to academic publishing in the humanities and social sciences?’.

By performing a landscape study of the not-for-profit Radical Open Access Collective (Collective), this dissertation assesses and evaluates the radicalism of various different routes to OA in HSS.

It promotes the benefits of a self-reflexive approach to OA and the Collective’s networked model of smaller presses, while noting that low levels of marketing and indexing are detrimental to its research’s discoverability.

It also highlights that OA practice, even in the Collective, remains unduly influenced by harmful vestiges of the competitive market, notably prestige and academic colonialism.

Finally, this work proposes distinguishing ‘radical open access’ as a specific subsection of the wider OA movement and offers recommendations for a more radical future of HSS publishing.

DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/t5n3-x550

The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship

Authors : Nicky Agate, Rebecca Kennison, Stacy Konkiel, Christopher P. Long, Jason Rhody, Simone Sacchi, Penelope Weber

The current mechanisms by which scholars and their work are evaluated across higher education are unsustainable and, we argue, increasingly corrosive. Relying on a limited set of proxy measures, current systems of evaluation fail to recognize and reward the many dependencies upon which a healthy scholarly ecosystem relies.

Drawing on the work of the HuMetricsHSS Initiative, this essay argues that by aligning values with practices, recognizing the vital processes that enrich the work produced, and grounding our indicators of quality in the degree to which we in the academy live up to the values for which we advocate, a values-enacted approach to research production and evaluation has the capacity to reshape the culture of higher education.

URL : The transformative power of values-enacted scholarship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00647-z