Abstract
Open science refers to both the practices and norms of more open and transparent communication and research in scientific disciplines and the discourse on these practices and norms. There is no such discourse dedicated to the humanities. Though the humanities appear to be less coherent as a cluster of scholarship than the sciences are, they do share unique characteristics which lead to distinct scholarly communication and research practices. A discourse on making these practices more open and transparent needs to take account of these characteristics. The prevalent scientific perspective in the discourse on more open practices does not do so, which confirms that the discourse’s name, open science, indeed excludes the humanities so that talking about open science in the humanities is incoherent. In this paper, I argue that there needs to be a dedicated discourse for more open research and communication practices in the humanities, one that integrates several elements currently fragmented into smaller, unconnected discourses (such as on open access, preprints, or peer review). I discuss three essential elements of open science—preprints, open peer review practices, and liberal open licences—in the realm of the humanities to demonstrate why a dedicated open humanities discourse is required.
Highlights
There is a long history of sorting disciplines into clusters, primarily the sciences and humanities [1,2,3]
To mention are among the inadequacies of communication practices in contemporary humanities, for instance, the detrimental ways “peer reviewers criticize one another” [23]; the “great many unnecessary and inadequate publications” because of wrong incentives and evaluation mechanisms [13]; the fear of subjectivity that is immanent to judgement of quality alongside the denial of subjectivity in quantitative measurement [24]; the different funding and financial support structures that are unfit for a quicker uptake of open access in the humanities [25]; the debate around the “problem of value, transparency, and distributed financing of disciplinary activities” that arises because of the reluctance of learned societies to engage in more open processes [26]; the poisoned paradigm behind productivity and excellence, because of which scholarly communication is increasingly alienated [13,24,27,28]
The Foster Open Science taxonomy names a variety of elements from open access and open data to open reproducible research and open science policies, tools, or guidelines as first order elements of open science [50]
Summary
There is a long history of sorting disciplines into clusters, primarily the sciences and humanities [1,2,3]. Characteristics on the basis of which disciplines can be sorted into the humanities are, for instance, an emphasis on perspectivity (as opposed to objectivity in the sciences), verbality (as opposed to reliance on models), or historicity (as opposed to systemic integration) of contributions to discourses in these disciplines [4] These characteristics are expressive of the research paradigms and epistemologies employed in what is commonly termed the humanities: the importance of hermeneutics, source criticism, and nuanced, contextual meaning [5,6,7]. These more abstract characteristics lead to distinct practices such as the reliance on long-form publications (primarily the monograph), qualitative arguments, slower, editorially-heavy publishing processes, recursivity of its discourses, critique, and qualitative embedding of references [8,9,10].1. In other words: though there is no one field of scholarly communication—but at least one for each cluster of scholarship—there is currently only one dedicated discourse on open research and scholarship, and this is open science
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