The shift to ‘open’ working across the social sciences as a discipline group entails a welcome but demanding cultural change. Yet, Patrick Dunleavy argues that there have already been three false starts: focusing only on isolated bits of the open agend…
Category: open science
What does Open Science mean for disciplines where pen and paper are still the main working methods?
Open Science and its wider application to the social sciences and humanities, is predicated on the idea that research can be reproduced and shared across digital platforms, but to what extent do researchers actually use digital tools a part of their wo…
Eight components for ‘open social science’ – An agenda for cultural change
The open science movement has been gathering force in STEM disciplines for many years, and some of its procedural elements have been adopted also by quantitative social scientists. However, little work has yet been done on exploring how more ambitious …
Has COVID-19 been the making of Open Science?
One outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to put discussions about open research methods and practices, such as preprints, into the mainstream. Drawing on an recent analysis of the extent to which Open Science principles have been adopted during th…
For Open Grant Proposals
David Lang makes the case that default open grant proposals benefit both individual scientists as well as the broader scientific community. Science is designed to move slowly. Debate, rigor, and peer review add layers of organized skepticism to new ide…
Introducing Open Research Europe (ORE) – Q and A with Michael Markie
This week sees the launch of Open Research Europe (ORE), an open publishing platform developed by the European Commission for research funded by its Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding schemes. These funding programmes cover a significant volume of…
Universal Open Science policies risk alienating researchers
Open Science policies are becoming increasingly institutionalised at the national level. However, as Erika Lilja shows, the inherent contradictions of implementing Open Science policies in a uniform manner across all disciplines risks alienating researchers from these policies. Grand challenges, such as inequality and climate change, and sudden global challenges, such as COVID-19, require mission-based and solution-centered … Continued
Beyond mandates: For open science to become a norm, it must be recognised and rewarded
Calls to align incentives in academia to promote open research practices are not new. However, in recent years research funders are increasingly implementing policies and schemes designed to promote open science practices amongst researchers. In this post, Maria Cruz and Hans de Jonge outline details of the Dutch Research Council’s (NWO) new Open Science Fund, … Continued
COVID-19: Where is the data?
The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has led many to argue that scholarly communication and publishing is undergoing a revolution, in terms of not only the wider opening of access to research, but also the data underlying it. In this post Julien Larrègue, Philippe Vincent-Lamarre, Frédéric Lebaron, and Vincent Larivière, discuss findings from their study … Continued
The need for open data sharing in the era of global pandemics
Since the start of the pandemic, data on different countries’ case counts has been readily available. However, not all data is equally useful. In this post, Bernardo Gutierrez and Sabrina Li, from the Open COVID-19 Data Working Group and the Oxford Martin School, outline the need for much more detailed, open and accessible sharing to … Continued