I can hardly believe we’re already almost done the second module of the POSE workshop. For our second discussion forum, we were asked to respond to the following:

When we think open, it’s often framed in a discussion of access, as we encountered during the Open Access module. Open research helps to address issues of reproducibility in one’s work, which in turn has impacts on such things as trust in research outputs and the quality of policy that we are able to implement.

In the article A manifesto for reproducible science, the authors present several issues connected to open research that impact the reproducibility in the sciences. Similarly, in Replicability and replication in the humanities, the author explores the implications of reproducibility in the humanities.

Reflecting on what you have learned in the Open Research unit and after reading one (or both!) of the two pieces above, start a discussion on how feasible and/or important a transition to open is, either generally for society or very specifically for your area of practice.

Open Research Discussion | Program for Open Scholarship and Education (ubc.ca)

While I plan on reading both articles, I’ve only had time to read the humanities article so far, which I thought would balance out nicely with the course OR Chat: Replicability, Generalizability, and the ManyClasses Approach to Open Science by Ben Motz. That presentation was focused mainly on psychology and education.

Anyway, back to the question of feasibility and importance of the transition to to open. Something that often stands out to me when discussing open is that researchers (myself included) get at least a little stressed out by the perceived additional time required to make research open. In this article, and in the course content and the ManyClasses presentation, I was struck by the amount of effort and time that it takes to provide all the content to make research replicable. And I felt that the process requires faith on the part of the researcher that someone will eventually want or need to take up a replication study. The humanities reading put it nicely when the author said:

Of course, one will have to find the right balance between carrying out new research — with, possibly or likely, stumbling upon new truths,
never found before — and replicating a study and thereby making it likely that the original study results are true.

Peels, R. Replicability and replication in the humanities. Res Integr Peer Rev 4, 2 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-018-0060-4. Page 8 on pdf download.

However, my gut instinct to focus on effort seems to be missing the point. If we research to help us understand things better, or to learn new things, we need to be able to trust what each other finds out. And making our research outputs open is one important way of doing that.

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