Welcome to DARIAH Open
Open Science is a great enterprise that comes in a variety of flavours.
For many, it empowers individuals to become champions of social, cultural and technological innovation, a solution for the global serial crisis and a way for researcher communities to take back control over the dynamics of knowledge creation and dissemination. Also, from another viewpoint, it is a means for intellectuals to become better citizens by opening up their findings to the public and earning wider recognition in their research field.
But it can also be thought of a skillset to make the best use of digital technology in the networked 21st century for more efficient, transparent, and reusable scholarship. Or simply a means to get more funding. Or, for that matter, a scientific paradigm shift that is not always easy to keep up with and translate to one’s own research practices. It can be perceived as a natural consequence of collaborative knowledge creation but also an imperative.
However one might feel about Open Science, it is clear that we have never had this wealth of tools, networks and ease of collaboration at our disposal to create the future environment that works best for our research.
The DARIAH Open blog is a place to explore these pathways to the open research culture as they specifically pertain to research communities in the arts and humanities.
We believe that Open Scholarship works best when it is deeply situated in the respective epistemic cultures. One of our missions is to close the gap between the positive attitudes many have toward openness and actual research practices. Recognizing that arts and humanities scholars frequently encounter difficulties or even limitations of different sorts when aiming to translate principles of Open Science into their everyday scholarly practices, we will use this platform to bring together news, emerging policy perspectives, resources, expert interviews, success stories but also debates on discipline-specific challenges from around Open Humanities to inform our communities about their options when deciding on strategies for their research.
On the other hand, we want arts and humanities research to be recognized as a valuable and significant contributor to the open movement. Often the tools and practices that enable the transition from silo-based approaches and bring mutual understanding across disciplines are not explicitly branded as parts of the Open Science toolkit. On this platform, we wish to give greater visibility for these assets and connect them with the rest of the open scholarship.
We are living in the middle of a major transformation of how research is designed, performed and evaluated, and how knowledge is shared. Importantly, we are not only observing this new ecosystem as it emerges but are also in the position of actively shaping it to our shared needs. The DARIAH Open blog is a contribution to this endeavour, as it offers targeted advocacy and support to arts and humanities scholars who are taking their first, second or even further steps towards opening up their research.
Naturally and ideally, this can be only realised in the form of a conversation. We wish to strengthen communities of practice and engage them in more intensive dialogues about how – and how best – to make both scholarly works and workflows open, and how to make the most from arts and humanities research.