Alignment of Top-Down Policies With Emerging Bottom-Up Practices: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”

Abstract: In their article, Marsden and Morgan-Short comprehensively review the current state and development trajectories for key areas within open research practices, both in general as well as more particularly in the context of language sciences. As the article reveals, the scope of open research practices is enormous and essentially touches upon every aspect of performing and interacting with research. The authors touch upon the lack of an established metascience within language sciences that would help inform and guide development of research practices, but, as I see it, the problem is universal, and there would be benefit in creating a stronger and more cohesive metascience discipline in general. While researchers have established practices of research, education, and dedicated scholarly communication outlets within the philosophy of science, history of science, information science, and higher education policy, metascience has remained an area where the discussion is highly distributed and appears sporadically across diverse research disciplines. As Marsden and Morgan-Short’s review demonstrates, there are a lot of open questions relating to how to move forward on a global scale in the best interest of research and researchers. A more cohesive core of metascience would aid in the creation of immediately useful knowledge.