Étiquette : open research

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

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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EN

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

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

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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EN

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

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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EN

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

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

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EN

Mobilizing Knowledge in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Exploring Competing Articulations of Openness in Policy and Practice

Author : Corina MacDonald

Knowledge mobilization (KMb) is a policy discourse and framework used by major Canadian research funding bodies to promote and monitor the efficiency of knowledge transfer between the university and society. Since 2009, most humanities and social science (HSS) researchers applying for federal funding must complete a KMb module that describes their intended non-academic collaborators and audiences, planned outreach activities, and metrics to gauge their success.

The ideals of public engagement set out in KMb policy are worthy ones for scholars to strive towards. The framework can also provide legitimation for a diverse range of research practices, relationships, and outputs. Applicants must think about sharing their work throughout the research process rather than simply at its end. This introduces a more expansive understanding of the relations of knowledge producers and their publics than is found in Canadian open access policies and mandates.

Many practices commonly understood as open research, such as data sharing, diamond open access publishing, or sharing via blogs or podcasts, would be considered knowledge mobilization activities, as would practices of community-engaged research or knowledge co-production. KMb policy thus governs much of the making public of humanities research in Canada; however, it embodies conflicting ideas about the value of shared knowledge. Its emphasis on knowledge as transferable imposes temporal, material, and cognitive restrictions on scholarship.

Critics of KMb dismiss it as performative and a tool of institutional governance or argue that it quantifies research as a return on investment. The critiques and possibilities of knowledge mobilization policy offer insight into wider contemporary struggles over the meaning of openness for HSS research. This article explores its impact on Canadian HSS scholars in relation to critical debates about changing relations of knowledge, labor, and value in humanities scholarship.

URL : Mobilizing Knowledge in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Exploring Competing Articulations of Openness in Policy and Practice

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7849

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EN

Global Open Research Commons: Enabling Curation for the Next 20 Years

Authors : Andrew Treloar, C. J. Woodford

This paper addresses the requirements for long-term preservation through a system lens. Rather than focussing on specific technical elements that are needed for curation, this paper considers all the system elements that need to be put in place, and intentionally maintained, to ensure curation for the long term.

This paper begins by making the argument that curation requires attention to preservation over time. The need for preservation, in turn, requires both sustainable data content and sustained infrastructure. These infrastructures consist of many elements, both social and technical, all of which need attention.

Then, this paper briefly introduces the concept of the open research commons as a way of conceptualising these elements, before examining in some detail the Global Open Research Commons (GORC) typology of essential elements. This work was developed through a Research Data Alliance Working Group, which started with a definition of a commons as ‘a global trusted ecosystem that provides seamless access to high-quality interoperable research outputs and services.’ The essential elements in the typology include Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure, services and tools, research objects, human capacity, rules of participation and access, governance, engagement, and sustainability.

This general approach was then extended by the GORC International Model Working Group to ‘review and identify attributes or features currently implemented by a target set of GORC organisations.’ The GORC approach has already been used in designing the creation of new commons, characterising existing research infrastructures, and analysing interoperability between commons. Future work, to commence in 2025, will clarify how the International Model might be used and adopted, as well as improve how it is presented.

Our researchers require ongoing access to reliable and sustainable data aggregations. These will need to be curated for reuse and interoperability over the long term to support the integrity of the scholarly record. The GORC groups are working towards an interoperable set of platforms that together build on advances in internet technologies and the consensus and strengths of the research community.

URL : Global Open Research Commons: Enabling Curation for the Next 20 Years

DOI : https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v19i1.1054