Authors: Skupien, Stefan (1); Röwert, Ronny (2); Loesch, Thomas (3); Heck, Tamara (3); Konkol, Markus (4); Blümel, Clemens (5); Irawan, Dasapta Erwin (6)
Organization(s): 1: Berlin University Alliance; 2: Hamburg University of Technology; 3: Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education; 4: University of Twente; 5: German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; 6: Institut Teknologi Bandung
Keywords: Systematic Review, Research Methodology, Disciplinary Differences, Open Science Practices
Submitted to: https://www.open-science-conference.eu/
The Corona crisis with its respective uplift of open research approaches has confirmed the impression that concepts and practices of Open Science still remain unclear and blurry due to its novel and dynamic nature. Thus, 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 get a better understanding of the conceptual scope and boundaries of research on Open Science, we will contribute a poster to the Open Science conference with first results from an ongoing open and collaborative project that aims at systematically reviewing the state of the art of research on Open Science. In our project we aim at providing an openly accessible comparative overview and methodological reflection of empirical studies that focus on the attitudes, assessments, and practices of Open Science among individuals, communities, and organizations.
With this approach, we intend to clarify the current understanding of Open Science on two levels: First, on the level of study contents, empirical studies capture diverse understandings and aspects of Open Science among different disciplinary, practitioner, geographical region and user groups among others. Numerous empirical studies have asked similar questions, but often to different groups of respondents. Therefore, a complementary overview of existing studies will allow us to summarize key findings and to identify key understandings and practices of Open Science across multiple respondents.
On the second level of study methodologies, a critical review simultaneously takes into account that empirical studies are themselves shaping our perspective of Open Science. Therefore, we will further inductively study and compare the applied concepts and chosen methodological designs, which were chosen to capture attitudes, assessments, and practices of Open Science. On this level, we aim to explore and understand potentials and limits of methodologies, e.g. of quantitative and qualitative approaches.
In our review, we started with a corpus of 104 studies investigating Open Science in a broad sense and extended the corpus following a combined approach of snowball sampling and systematic literature search. This corpus is openly accessible via Zotero. We included peer-reviewed studies as well as gray literature and coded studies regarding their Open Science topic, methodology, discipline and targeted groups. With the poster, we will present first results, like distributions of the Open Science topics addressed by discipline or by methodology and suggest first conclusions relevant for researchers and practitioners.
Our systematic review contributes to two major objectives: On the one hand practitioners and policy makers in the field of Open Science-such as the recent UNESCO-efforts to develop an international standard-setting (2020)-receive a structured overview of the existing literature on Open Science implementations and interpretations. On the other hand a mapping of existing empirical investigations into Open Science sheds a light on gaps with regards to methods, concepts, and results where further research and implementation projects could tap into to support Open Science as response to future crises.