Patrick Dunleavy, writing for the LSE Impact blog:
Other US-based promoters of open science, like the Centre for Open Science, also cover mainly the quantitative disciplines in social sciences (like psychology and health studies). Yet COS’s somewhat disturbing strategy for accelerating cultural change towards ‘open’ starts with ‘Make it Easy’, goes through ‘Make it Normative (sic)’ and then ‘Make it Rewarding’, but ends up with ‘Make it Required’. No apparent explanation is given of how that last stage would work outside of laboratory or experimental work, some kinds of randomized control trials, or purely computational research. A careful analysis of many psychology journals’ policies by Prosser et al suggests that ‘open science risks becoming a closed door’ for qualitative researchers in the discipline.
The piece is a good primer on the hidden parochialism of “Open Science” as a phrase and, to some extent, a movement. Make room for qualitative social scientists, Dunleavy suggests, and you’ll create space for humanists too:
Valuable as the insights about open science in STEMM disciplines are, a broader and more inclusive approach is needed if ‘open’ is to develop fully across the social sciences – in the process hopefully reshaping not just into crossover disciplines with the humanities (like law, social and political philosophy, contemporary history and the digital humanities), but also spilling over into a wider range of humanities subjects (like older history, philosophy and literature studies).