Open Research and Digital Identity

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What is Open Research?

Open research (sometimes referred to as ‘open science’) is a movement that aims to make all aspects of the research process freely and publicly accessible. Different organizations have developed slightly different frameworks to organize and identify the key practices associated with open research, but these practices often include:

• Open Access: Research findings are made freely and publicly available online, either by publishing in open-access journal, or by self-hosting publications on an open platform. Open access models and principles are outlined in more detail in this educational UBC guide.
• Open Research Data: All research data, including final results as well as raw research datasets, are made publicly available in online databases. The Open Data Handbook outlines open data principles as well as strategies for making data open. The FAIR Principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) are related in that they outline best practices for management and stewardship of open data.
• Open Education: Educational resources and activities are openly shared online, and equitable pedagogical practices are used. Open UBC describes the principles and practices associated with open education here.
• Open Methods and Processes: The processes, methods and infrastructure used throughout all stages of the research process are made freely and publicly available. For example, all software used in the research process might be made open-source, meaning the source code can be read, used and modified by anyone.
  • Open Software
  • Open Methods
  • Open Infrastructure
  • Open Notebooks
• Open Publishing Practices: Publishers evaluate research transparently, and researchers publish not only final research articles, but also earlier versions of their work, corrections to their previous work, and null results (outcomes that do not support researcher hypotheses).
  • Open Peer Review
  • Publishing Preprints, Null Results, Corrections

Open Research and Digital Identity

Do you identify as a researcher? As you get more involved in research projects (either in a more formal academic setting, or through citizen science), this might become a new aspect of your identity that intersects with your digital identity. For most researchers, digital identity includes online identifiers (like an ORCID iD) that uniquely identify you and link you with your publications. More broadly though, your digital identity as a researcher also includes all the information about your research that is publicly available online, including publications, but also blog posts, online profiles and potentially social media posts.

Since practicing open research involves means making more aspects of your research publicly available online, it necessarily expands your digital identity! Increasing the information about your work that is available online helps fellow researchers, potential employers, and the general public better understand your research. Open Research also facilitates collaboration, by allowing others to more easily reproduce and build on your results. This could increase the reach and impact of your work, a major motivation for many Open Researchers. This increased reach has been measured quantitatively, with research showing that open access publication has a positive impact on citation count.

You may also want to consider how your fellow researchers, your participants, and the public percieve your participation in Open Research. Using and promoting Open Research practices could signal that you share the communal and prosocial values associated with Open Research. Analysis of open research literature shows how it explicitly promotes prosocial and collaborative ideals, and how compared with traditional research paradigms, open research models foster more engagement from members of underrepresented groups. Openly sharing research data and content also demonstrates transparency and accountability on the part of the researcher, increasing public trust in science generally, as well as more specifically, how much the public, undergraduate students, and fellow researchers trust you and your research.

Open Communities and Social Identity

Identity can be seen as something that you define and cultivate yourself, as an individual, or as something that is socially defined, describing your position within a community.

To better understand the relationship between involvement in open research and online social identity, it’s interesting to consider research into open-source software communities. Open-source software is built from source-code that is made freely and publicly available online. The open research and open source software movements have similar principles and goals, challenging traditional models of ownership, promoting more equitable knowledge dissemination and facilitating collaborative innovation, but the open-source movement has been around for longer, and these communties have been the subject of more research.

What motivates open-source developers to participate in open-source projects without financial compensation? Researchers report that in many cases, participation is motivated by social identification and identity development. In other words, by contributing to an open-source project, developers become part of a community of shared values and goals. They build a reputation and standing within that community, they pick up the norms and values associated with open-source culture, and they may benefit in various ways from their membership.

Consider the communities in your area of research that you are, or could be, a part of. How do you think practicing Open Research could affect your membership or position in those communities? Could publishing your raw research data help you to strengthen bonds with other researchers by fostering collaboration? Could publishing in an Open Access conference help you to establish yourself as a member of a research community that is aligned with Open Research principles? Or could it alienate fellow researchers who buy into more traditional or individualistic research paradigms?

Related Digital Tattoo Tutorials:

• Scholarly Publishing and Open Access | The Digital Tattoo Project
• Open Learning | The Digital Tattoo Project
• Creative Commons Licences | The Digital Tattoo Project

Guides, Resources and Collections:

• Open UBC | University of British Columbia
  • “A curated collection of resources for faculty and students to learn about open scholarship and what it means to teaching, learning, and research at UBC”
• Open UToronto | University of Toronto
  • “A gateway to a wide array of ‘open’ projects from The University of Toronto”
• UBC Program for Open Scholarship and Education | University of British Columbia
  • A free and open program “for faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students with an interest in open research, open access, open data, and open education”
• Open Definition | Open Knowledge Foundation
  • “Sets out principles that define “openness” in relation to data and content.”
• The Open Data Handbook | Open Knowledge Foundation
  • “gathers a variety of resource that relate to open data and are produced by the community“
• FAIR Data Principles: What is FAIR? | Statistics Canada
  • “This video will break down what it means to be FAIR in terms of data and metadata”

Cited Papers and Articles:

• Factors Inuencing Open Science Participation Through Research Data Sharing and Reuse Among Researchers: A Systematic Literature Review | Ahmed, Othman and Noordin (2020)
• Open-Source Software Development as Gift Culture: Work and Identity Formation in an Internet Community | Bergquist (2003)
• Adoption of Open Source Software: The role of social identification | Gwebu and Wang (2010)
• The effect of open access and downloads (’hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies | Hitchcock (2016)
• How to Think about Social Identity | Kalin and Sambanis (2018)
• How open science helps researchers succeed | McKiernan et al. (2016)
• Open science, communal culture, and women’s participation in the movement to improve science | Murphy et al. (2020)
• Data reuse and the open data citation advantage | Piwowar and Vision (2013)
• Open science and public trust in science: Results from two studies | Rosman, Bosnjak, Silber, Koßmann and Heycke (2022)
• Do Open-Science Badges Increase Trust in Scientists Among Undergraduates, Scientists, and the Public? | Schneider, Rosman, Kelava and Merk (2022)

Discuss

Consider your research, or the research that you might like to do in the future…

• What open research practices would be most applicable and feasible for you? What does Open Research look like in your field?
• Why not practice open research? What challenges are barriers to open research are you most concerned about?
• What are the potential benefits to open research in your discipline? Are these benefits to the public, or benefits to you personally, as a researcher?

What do you think? Tell us using the comment below.