Étiquette : openness

Catégories
EN

Doing Openness Otherwise: Democratization and OA Publishing in the HSS

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

Catégories
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

Catégories
EN

What Does Openness Mean for the Humanities? Redefining Ethical and Reflexive Practices in Open Research

Author : Adeola Eze

Notions of openness in research have largely been shaped by scientific principles of transparency, efficiency, and replicability, operationalized through standardized workflows, interoperable infrastructures, and measurable impact. Endorsed by funders and policy frameworks, this model often misfits humanities and social science epistemologies in which knowledge is interpretive, historically situated, and ethically entangled with context.

This article critiques policy-led definitions of openness by tracing how open access and open science have been implemented through compliance regimes, metrics, and author-facing payment models, with uneven consequences across regions, languages, and institutions. Rather than rejecting open research, the article reinterprets it through a humanities lens.

It develops a theory of interpretive openness through Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work and extends it through three historical case studies—the cento, scholastic glossing, and Derrida’s margins—which show how form-bound reuse, annotation, and participatory reading have long operated as infrastructures of public meaning-making.

The article then connects these genealogies to contemporary digital publishing and editorial infrastructures, including preprints, open peer review, and web annotation, and argues for open research designs that value interpretive labor, visible process, and community accountable infrastructures.

URL : What Does Openness Mean for the Humanities? Redefining Ethical and Reflexive Practices in Open Research

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7873

Catégories
EN

FAIRness of Research Data in the European Humanities Landscape

Authors : Ljiljana Poljak Bilić, Kristina Posavec

This paper explores the landscape of research data in the humanities in the European context, delving into their diversity and the challenges of defining and sharing them. It investigates three aspects: the types of data in the humanities, their representation in repositories, and their alignment with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

By reviewing datasets in repositories, this research determines the dominant data types, their openness, licensing, and compliance with the FAIR principles. This research provides important insight into the heterogeneous nature of humanities data, their representation in the repository, and their alignment with FAIR principles, highlighting the need for improved accessibility and reusability to improve the overall quality and utility of humanities research data.

URL : FAIRness of Research Data in the European Humanities Landscape

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications12010006

Catégories
EN

Social Justice: The Golden Thread in the Openness Movement

Authors : Reggie Raju, Jill Claassen, Kaela De Lillie

The current publishing landscape perpetuates biases that continue to exclude those who have been previously marginalized, specifically from the Global South including Africa. Incorporating philanthropy as the only driving principle to openly share knowledge is insufficient to truly empower and be inclusive to those who have been relegated to the periphery of the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Social justice principles have to underpin the foundation of this ecosystem, in tandem with philanthropy, to shed light on these exclusionary, systemic publishing practices and processes. This will entail first breaking down these unfair practices and then rebuilding the ecosystem by advancing equity, diversity and inclusion.

This paper highlights the current gaps in the openness movement and demonstrates, through an exemplar of a publishing platform, how the publishing landscape can be transformed. The publishing platform employs a multi-tenant model that enables multiple institutions to publish and disseminate knowledge on one shared instance of the software.

The continental platform and the tenant model that it utilizes address the technological and infrastructural barriers often experienced in the Global South and Africa, while simultaneously serving as a collective hub for hosting African scholarship.

This case study methodology is used to investigate how the alternate publishing route recaptures the philanthropic pillars of the openness movement. The findings provide evidence for a return to the founding principles of the openness movement and, as importantly, demonstrates the impact of open access on student success.

URL : Social Justice: The Golden Thread in the Openness Movement

DOI : https://doi.org/10.3390/publications11030036

Catégories
EN

Assessing the publishing priorities and preferences among STEM researchers at a large R1 institution

Authors : Ibraheem Ali, Jason Burton, M. Wynn Tranfield

The cost of academic publishing has increased substantially despite the ease with which information can be shared on the web. Open Access publishing is a key mechanism for amplifying research access, inclusivity, and impact.

Despite this, shifting to a free-to-read publishing environment requires navigating complex barriers that vary by career status and publishing expectations. In this article, we investigate the motivations and preferences of researchers situated within our large research institution as a case study for publishing attitudes at similar institutions.

We surveyed the publishing priorities and preferences of researchers at various career stages in STEM fields as they relate to openness, data practices, and assessment of research impact. Our results indicate that publishing preferences, data management experience and research impact assessment vary by career status and departmental approaches to promotion.

We find that open access publishing is widely appreciated regardless of career status, but financial limitations and publishing expectations were common barriers to publishing in Open Access journals.

Our findings shed light on publishing attitudes and preferences among researchers at a major R1 research institution, and offer insight into advocacy strategies that incentivize open access publishing.

URL : Assessing the publishing priorities and preferences among STEM researchers at a large R1 institution

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16316

Catégories
EN

Iranian researchers’ perspective about concept and effect of open science on research publication

Authors : Maryam Zarghani, Leila Nemati-Anaraki, Shahram Sedghi, Abdolreza Noroozi Chakoli, Anisa Rowhani-Farid

Background

Sharing research outputs with open science methods for different stakeholders causes better access to different studies to solve problems in diverse fields, which leads to equal access conditions to research resources, as well as greater scientific productivity. Therefore, the aim of this study was to perceive the concept of openness in research among Iranian health researchers.

Methods

From the beginning of August to the middle of November 2021, twenty semi-structured interviews were held with Iranian health researchers from different fields using purposeful, snowball, and convenience sampling. The interviews continued until data saturation. Data analysis was performed with thematic analysis using MAXQDA 20. Finally, seven main issues related to open science were identified.

Results

Through analysis of the interviews, 235 primary codes and 173 main codes were extracted in 22 subclasses. After careful evaluation and integration of subclasses and classes, they were finally classified into nine categories and three main themes. Analysis showed that openness in research was related to three main themes: researchers’ understanding of open science, the impact of open science on publication and sharing of research, concerns and reluctance to open research.

Conclusion

The conditions of access to research output should be specified given the diversity of studies conducted in the field of health; issues like privacy as an important topic of access to data and information in the health system should also be specified. Our analysis indicated that the conditions of publication and sharing of research processes should be stated according to different scopes of health fields.

The concept of open science was related to access to findings and other research items regardless of cost, political, social, or racial barriers, which could create collective wisdom in the development of knowledge. The process of publication and sharing of research related to open access applies to all types of outputs, conditions of access, increasing trust in research, creation of diverse publication paths, and broader participation of citizens in research.

Open science practices should be promoted to increase the circulation and exploitation rates of knowledge while adjusting and respecting the limits of privacy, intellectual property and national security rights of countries.

URL : Iranian researchers’ perspective about concept and effect of open science on research publication

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09420-9