Call for papers: Special Issue on Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences 

​​Abstract submission deadline: 30 January 2025

In recent years, research production and communication in the biological and physical sciences has been transformed by openness. Through data sharing, preprints, open peer review and open access publishing, among other practices, the ideas behind open research (often termed open science) have become mainstream forces and have been adopted by scientists more broadly (Sever 2023). Yet while open research has emerged out of scientific communities themselves, it is also promoted by funders and universities looking to increase transparency, trust and efficacy of scientific research (Farley et al. 2024). Although not explicitly framed in a way that excludes humanities and social science (HSS) disciplines, open research does not always neatly fit with their working practices or research cultures, which has led many researchers in these disciplines to feel excluded or unenthused by the hegemonic turn to openness in the sciences. 

This is not to say that open research is not practised in HSS disciplines. There are myriad ways in which research is communicated publicly, immediately and openly with recourse to openly shared and annotated archival resources (e.g., https://derridas-margins.princeton.edu/), experimental forms of peer review (e.g., https://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/) and remixed research presentation (e.g., http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/). These practices are not frequently conceived as ‘open research’ in a scientific sense and represent a separate, but important, approach to open academic knowledge production. Such approaches display a commitment to openness that is less concerned with transparency, efficiency and/or freely accessible resources and is more concerned with experimentation and the process of opening up scholarship, posing questions around how the dominant understandings of open research and open science relate to HSS disciplines and what they can learn from one another. Do the humanities and social sciences need their own conception of openness, as for example Marcel Knöchelmann (2019) argues, or is the relationship between openness and HSS research more complicated or even antagonistic? Or further still, does open research itself need to humanise through ideas such as Sabina Leonelli’s ‘judicial connection’ (Leonelli 2023) or more general ideas relating to knowledge commons (Chan and Costa 2005; Bell 2019)? 

This special issue seeks articles on Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The editors hope to bring together humanistic critiques of open research along with critical reflections on HSS research in practice. We are interested in what the futures of open research might be within HSS disciplines from a variety of interdisciplinary and critical perspectives. Of special interest is the extent to which open research can blur the distinction between research and publishing practices or expand upon the very idea of publishing through a range of digital practices. 

Potential topics include:

• What can HSS disciplines learn from the turn to open research and vice versa?
• How might specific open practices such as open data, open peer review, replication and preprints apply to HSS research
• Analytical reflections on examples of open HSS research in practice
• Critical analysis of how open research applies to HSS research
• Analysis of the drivers of open research (top-down, biomedical sciences, bottom-up, governmental, etc.)
• Arguments against or in favour of open research in HSS
• Proposals for alternative framings or definitions of open research HSS
• Historical examples of open research practices in HSS
• Specific disciplinary needs for open research in HSS

This special issue invites abstracts for papers of ~6,000-8,000 words (although other lengths and formats will be considered in discussion with the guest editor). When submitting an abstract, please also include a note that your abstract is for consideration in the Open Research for the humanities and social sciences special issue. Abstract submissions are due 30 January 2025 and should be addressed to the special issue editor Dr. Samuel A. Moore via sam214@cam.ac.uk. 

Full papers of accepted abstracts will be due by 15 May 2025. Please direct any questions to the special issue editor as well. 

Note on peer review process

Papers will undergo an experimental collective approach to peer review that authors will be invited to participate in and will be presented as a case study for the Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MORPHSS) project. This peer review process seeks to undermine the binary between open and closed forms of review processes and instead explores how HSS research can be ‘opened out’ through well-structured, careful collective forms of feedback and revision. More information will be provided at the time of submission.

MORPHSS is supported by funding from The Wellcome Trust and AHRC (314438/Z/24/Zr) and by the  Research England Development (RED) Fund

References

Bell, Kirsten. 2019. “Communitas and the Commons: The Open Access Movement and the Dynamics of Restructuration in Scholarly Publishing.” Anthropology Today 35 (5): 21–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12530.

Chan, Leslie, and Sely Costa. 2005. “Participation in the Global Knowledge Commons: Challenges and Opportunities for Research Dissemination in Developing Countries.” New Library World 106 (3/4): 141–63. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800510587354.

Farley, Ashley, Kazuhiro Hayashi, Eva Hnatkova, Hans De Jonge, Heather Joseph, Robert Kiley, Ruth King, and Rebecca Lawrence. 2024. “Changing the Paradigm for Primary Research Dissemination.” Wellcome Open Research 9 (February):37. https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.20715.1.

Knöchelmann, Marcel. 2019. “Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?” Publications 7 (4): 65. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7040065.

Leonelli, Sabina. 2023. Philosophy of Open Science. Cambridge Elements. Elements in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge New York, NY Port Melbourne New Delhi Singapore: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416368.

Sever, Richard. 2023. “Biomedical Publishing: Past Historic, Present Continuous, Future Conditional.” PLOS Biology 21 (10): e3002234. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002234.