Openness Profile: Defining the Concepts | January 31, 2020

Murphy, Fiona, & Jones, Phill. (2020, January 31). Openness Profile: Defining the Concepts (Version 1). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3607579

There is a concern among the Open Scholarship movement that there is a discrepancy between open science policy and the practices of current researchers. This may be due in part to incentive issues, but it could also be due to a lack of - or the wrong sorts of - tools being available. There could be challenges in education, persistent cultural norms or a mix of all of the above.The primary purpose of this study is to understand current practices in relation to Open Scholarship and to explore whether the development of an Openness Profile would reinforce early adopter behaviours and lead to wider understanding, take-up and uses. The overarching goal of Knowledge Exchange in this area is to encourage openness in scholarship as far as is ethically and legally practical. The guiding principle of ‘Open as possible, closed as necessary’ underlies the thinking of this research study and the openness profile project.Fiona Murphy and Phill Jones have been engaged as consultants by Knowledge Exchange to investigate these questions in a project designed to run between April 2019 and May 2020. This document reports progress to date, preliminary findings from the interview and analysis phases, outlines an initial set of requirements for an Openness Profile, and looks forward to the next project activities: preparation and holding the Stakeholder Workshop, and the final report.