Open Scholarship
I’ve completed a draft of Chapter 4, “Open Scholarship,” in which I attempt to make the case for for the principles: Be accountable, be transparent, be open. The thesis statement I pasted at the top, for myself, was: The principles and practices of open science are central to the quality of our research, our public communication and our accountability. The tricky thing for me was trying to make it work for the right audience — social scientists who are considering the pros and cons of open scholarship. So especially early-career scholars and people teaching graduate seminars. I would love to hear feedback on this at any level of style and substance. I posted it on SocArXiv here: osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/vw3ea/.
A couple of summary highlights:
If we are going to create a better system, we have to first develop an intolerance for the systemic problems of the current one. We have to stop seeing these as acceptable sacrifices for the greater good of a functioning academic peer review system. To change the culture we have to embrace rejection of the culture as it is. We have to let our imagination of a new culture emerge.
This institutional dynamic is essential. Despite the high importance of this question, if we as individual scholars devoted sufficient time and effort to building trust with everyone who reads or relies on our work we wouldn’t have time in the day left to do the research. Like workers producing any other complex commodity that requires an elaborate division of labor, scholars are highly specialized and our work can’t happen in isolation. Just like most of us can’t build our own computers, we can’t on our own construct the conditions for trusting us and our profession. We need a system. The system for building trust in scholarship includes technological tools, cultural norms, economic incentives, and organizational rules. Some of that is already in place, of course, in the features of our academic system, our institutional rewards, our publishing, and so on. But there are also contrary pressures, contaminating our efforts with a set of incentives that drive us toward bad practices, as the Francesca Gino case illustrates.
We need to find ways to adopt and communicate our adherence to the values of accountability, transparency, and openness in order to build trust in our own scholarship, even as we contribute to the long-term work of reforming our institutions. For those of us who do work in and around the non-academic public, the returns are clear. To win trust among people who we hope to work with, people need to see our open practices, our shared data and code, and our willingness to admit mistakes, embrace uncertainty, and entertain alternative explanations.
I will return to the social media aspects of this kind of incident (of social media abuse) in Chapter 6, but from the point of view of research openness, stories like this are important – and we should think about the contributions of our individual as well as institutional engagement in them. If we want to promote open scholarship practices, for all the good reasons described here, we need to hear scholars who are concerned with these risks, and acknowledge that they are hierarchically distributed (Sobieraj 2020). If we persist in the effort it is not because we discount the risks, but because we think social science is too important to give up in the face of them. So it’s good to be tenacious, but not dogmatic. The challenge is to move toward openness without incurring costs that are greater than those benefits.
My goal in this chapter has been to provide motivation, and some guidance, for opening up our scholarship, for the good of our readers, our colleagues, our collective accountability, and ourselves. The more we can cooperate in the process of opening, and move forward together, the less risk we take as individuals and the more we can maximize the benefits of this social and institutional change.
