Open Science

Since 2016 I have been the founding director of SocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences. I write and speak on open science subjects, about how open science is related to our goal of making social science more relevant and engaged with the communities we serve. I was once on the Committee on Publications of the American Sociological Association, and serve on the University of Maryland Library’s Publishing, Access, and Contract Terms working group (PACT).

There is an extended treatment of open science issues in my forthcoming book, Citizen Scholar. On this page there are some other writings, followed by materials from organizational work.

Learn more below

 

Writing

  • “How Sociology Can Save Itself.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2024. [essay]

  • “American Sociological Association, in absentia but not silent on open science.” 2023. [blog post]

  • Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen. 2023. “We are in a period of science policy innovation, yet there are major evidence gaps in evaluating their effectiveness.” LSE Impact Blog, July 27. [essay]

  • Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen, & Jessica Polka. 2023. “Interventions in Scholarly Communication: Design Lessons from Public Health.” DOI:10.5210/fm.v28i8.12941. [journal]

  • Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen, “Letter: Evaluating peer review at NIH.” Science 380(6649):1022.” [letter | preprint]

  • Jessica Polka, Iratxe Puebla, Damian Pattinson, Philip Hurst, Gary Mcdowell, Richard Sever, Thomas Lemberger, Michele Avissar-Whiting, Philip N. Cohen, Tony Ross-Hellauer, Gabriel Stein, Kathleen Shearer, Clare Stone, Victoria Tianjing Yan. “PRef: Describing Key Preprint Review Features.” [OSF Preprints]

  • Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen. “The Scholarly Knowledge Ecosystem: Challenges and Opportunities for the Field of Information” (2022). Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. [article]

  • “Openness and Diversity in Journal Editorial Boards” (2021). Working paper, by Micah Altman and Philip N. Cohen [SocArXiv]

  • “Why I’m leaving the American Sociological Association” (2021). [blog post]

  • “Host, Parasite, and Failure at the Colony Level: COVID-19 and the US Information Ecosystem.” (2021). [SocArXiv]

  • “On Clarifying the Goals of a Peer Review Taxonomy” (2020). [essay]

  • “Data analysis shows Journal Impact Factors in sociology are pretty worthless” (2020). [blog post]

  • “Public Engagement and the Influence Imperative.” Review essay in Contemporary Sociology (2018) [preprint]

SocArXiv

SocArxiv provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to store and link research materials (such as data and code). SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication. The archive is part of the University of Maryland Libraries, and runs on the Open Science Framework platform hosted by the Center for Open Science. We now host more than 13,000 papers, including more than 1100 relating to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • “Open scholarship generates opportunities.” UMD Libraries PACT. [article]

  • “The next stage of SocArXiv’s development: bringing greater transparency and efficiency to the peer review process.” LSE Impact Blog, October 16, 2017. [article]

  • “Developing SocArXiv: A new open archive of the social sciences to challenge the outdated journal system.” LSE Impact Blog, July 11, 2016. [article]

Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship

In 2018 I was a visiting scholar at the MIT Libraries Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). That engagement led to the publication of the Scholarly Communication in Sociology report. And I conducted a series of interviews with leaders in the field of open scholarship -- including Chris Bourg, Brian Nosek, Jessica Polka, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick -- videos from which were included in a meeting report.

Videos