Research cluster: Open Science

The contribution deals with what happens when science opens up and communicates’ and the emerging challenges for future scientific communication.

Mainstream media widely references scientific publications for claims of factuality and authority. But how did science journalism deal with the sudden surge in preprint publications that provided rapid but often uncertain knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic? While several studies have investigated various aspects of preprint-based science communication, only a few have focused on the public discourse in Germany, albeit with substantial challenges and controversies. In this mixed-method study, we identified the usage of preprints for 1,006 in about 390,000 German news stories, qualitatively analyzed the contexts of these preprints, and developed codes that reflect the epistemic sentiments. We further compared ...

Increasingly, researchers are expected to make their research data openly available. However, scientific fields differ in their research practices and norms for sharing research data. We provide quantitative evidence of differences in data practices and the public sharing of research data at a granularity of field-specificity that is rarely reported in open data surveys. Based on a survey of 8,822 researchers at German Universities, we find considerable variation, within and across disciplines, of data practices and rates of open data sharing. Our findings underline that in order to evaluate rates of public data sharing, a better understanding of the embedding of public data sharing into field-specific research practices is needed.

The article presents the initiative for open jurisprudence “OpenRewi”. The original goal of the initiative is to create a supporting infrastructure and platform for legal scholars who want to publish textbooks and other teaching materials, as well as anthologies, monographs and commentaries openly, i.e. open access. So far, no infrastructure or platform has been established for Open Access book publications that adequately reflects the specific needs of legal publishing. OpenRewi takes up exactly this need and at the same time be an impetus for a reform of legal publication culture.

Law as Open Science promises better access to more diverse scholarly literature and teaching or learning materials, transparent writing and citation styles, and more diverse authors, editors and readers. These potentials must be measured against the real existing book market in jurisprudence. So far, the orientation towards the printed monograph and the associated "Open Access fees" and established logics of reputation prevent many possibilities. In this context, an open science transformation would offer the chance to realise the promises of digitisation more extensively than before.

This review of the transparency literature has shown the evolution of the field through the prism of bibliographic and methodological data. In doing so, we have shed light into underlying disparities that go in line with arguments of structural problems and historical relations in socio-political contexts. We have highlighted the irony of the field in researching a topic that, due to determinants beyond the control of scholars (though OA policies may slowly generate a structural change), is in itself little transparent. The blurriness of the state of research in transparency and accountability helps us to address the overall debate of academic production in a critical manner, engaging with issues such as publishing and funding.

Research that investigates respective researchers’ engagement in Open Science varies widely in the topics addressed, methods employed, and disciplines investigated, which makes it difficult to integrate and compare its results. To investigate current outcomes of Open Science research, and to get a better understanding on well-researched topics and research gaps, we aimed at providing an openly accessible overview of empirical studies that focus on different aspects of Open Science in different scientific disciplines, academic groups and geographical regions. In this paper, we describe a data set of studies about Open Science practices retrieved following a PRISMA approach to compile a literature review.

Many journals now rely on editorial management systems, which are supposed to support the administration and decision making of editors, while aiming at making the process of communication faster and more transparent to both reviewers and authors. Yet, little is known about how these infrastructures support, stabilize, transform or change existing editorial practices. By exploring process generated data from a publisher’s editorial management system, we investigate the ways by which the digital infrastructure is used and how it represents the different realms of the process of peer review. How does the infrastructure support, strengthen or restrain editorial agency for administrating the process?

In our research, we examine the role of sharing of epistemic resources, such as research data, code, samples, or method know-how, for knowledge production in scientific fields. Our focus is on resources that are created in the process of research and shared with researchers or research groups outside of the original context of creation of the resource. Based on a field-comparative ethnographic study of research specialties in the sciences that differ in their epistemic practices, we examine the causal link between epistemic conditions of research on the one hand, and reoccurring patterns of sharing on the other. In our contribution we discuss challenges encountered when deriving causal explanations of field differences in sharing.

Increasingly, researchers are expected to make their research data openly available. However, scientific fields differ in their research practices and norms for sharing research data. We provide quantitative evidence of differences in data practices and the public sharing of research data at a granularity of field-specificity that is rarely reported in open data surveys. Based on a survey of 8,822 researchers at German Universities, we find considerable variation, within and across disciplines, of data practices and rates of open data sharing. Our findings underline that in order to evaluate rates of public data sharing, a better understanding of the embedding of public data sharing into field-specific research practices is needed.

Increasingly, researchers are expected to make their research data openly available. In this keynote, I provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in research on the sharing of research data with a particular emphasis on understanding field-specific motivations of researchers to share or not to share.

Open Science, it is often held, aims at enhancing the science and society relationship by making science more open, transparent, and accessible to the public, thereby restoring trust in scholarly knowledge production. Yet, in order to restore trust and to make science more accountable to the public, scholars are also expected to more openly communicate their ideas and findings to the public, exploring new channels for communication and interaction with wider audiences. This session aims to explore which frictions such practices of open communication face in the light digitalization.

Open science advocates and an increasing number of political stakeholders and research funding agencies encourage researchers to publicly share the various instantiations of scientific knowledge that are generated during the research process, in particular research data, but also computer code, method protocols, or material specimens. Critical for the success of this vision is the readiness of research groups to share those tools and resources that they have created. The study I will present seeks to contribute to a theory of field-specific forms of sharing by looking specifically at the question how sharing decisions are influenced by the epistemic conditions for research in a field.