Tag: open science

SocArXiv joins preprint services in endorsing OSTP memo

DallE open science collage

The SocArXiv steering committee joins the preprint services arXiv and ioRxiv/medRxiv in their recent statements in support of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo that directs the federal government to make outputs from government-funded research publicly accessible without charge or embargo. We endorse these statements, and reproduce them below.

arXiv OSTP memorandum response

April 11, 2023

The recent Office of Science and Technology Policy “Nelson Memorandum” on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research”1 is a welcome affirmation of the public right to access government funded research results, including publication of articles describing the research, and the data behind the research. The policy is likely to increase access to new and ongoing research, enable equitable access to the outcome of publicly funded research efforts, and enable and accelerate more research. Improved immediate access to research results may provide significant general social and economic benefits to the public.

Funding Agencies can expedite public access to research results through the distribution of electronic preprints of results in open repositories, in particular existing preprint distribution servers such as arXiv,2 bioRxiv,3 and medRxiv.4 Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery.5

Distribution of research findings by preprints, combined with curation of the archive of submissions, provides universal access for both authors and readers in perpetuity. Authors can provide updated versions of the research, including “as accepted,” with the repositories openly tracking the progress of the revision of results through the scientific process. Public access to the corpus of machine readable research manuscripts provides innovative channels for discovery and additional knowledge generation, including links to the data behind the research, open software tools, and supplemental information provided by authors.

Preprint repositories support a growing and innovative ecosystem for discovery and evaluation of research results, including tools for improved accessibility and research summaries. Experiments in open review and crowdsourced commenting can be layered over preprint repositories, providing constructive feedback and alternative models to the increasingly archaic process of anonymous peer review.

Distribution of research results by preprints provides a well tested path for immediate, free, and equitable access to research results. Preprint archives can support and sustain an open and innovative ecosystem of tools for research discovery and verification, providing a long term and sustainable approach for open access to publicly funded research.

1White House OSTP Public Access Memo

2arXiv website

3bioRxiv website

4medRxiv website

5NIH Preprint Pilot, “The Pace of Artificial Intelligence Innovations: Speed, Talent, and Trial-and-Error”

bioRxiv and medRxiv response to the OSTP memo – an open letter to US funding agencies

2023-04-11

The preprint servers bioRxiv and medRxiv welcome the recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo advising US government agencies to make publications and data from research funded by US taxpayers publicly accessible immediately, without embargo or cost. This new policy will stimulate research, increase equitability, and generate health, environmental and social benefits not only in the US but all around the world.

Agencies can enable free public access to research results simply by mandating that reports of federally funded research are made available as “preprints” on servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, and chemRxiv, before being submitted for journal publication. This will ensure that the findings are freely accessible to anyone anywhere in the world. An important additional benefit is the immediate availability of the information, avoiding the long delays associated with evaluation by traditional scientific journals (typically around one year). Scientific inquiry then progresses faster, as has been particularly evident for COVID research during the pandemic.

Prior access mandates in the US and elsewhere have focused on articles published by academic journals. This complicated the issue by making it a question of how to adapt journal revenue streams and led to the emergence of new models based on article-processing charges (APCs). But APCs simply move the access barrier to authors: they are a significant financial obstacle for researchers in fields and communities that lack the funding to pay them. A preprint mandate would achieve universal access for both authors and readers upstream, ensuring the focus remains on providing access to research findings, rather than on how they are selected and filtered.

Mandating public access to preprints rather than articles in academic journals would also future-proof agencies’ access policies. The distinction between peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed material is blurring as new approaches make peer review an ongoing process rather than a judgment made at a single point in time. Peer review can be conducted independently of journals through initiatives like Review Commons. And traditional journal-based peer review is changing: for example, eLife, supported by several large funders, peer reviews submitted papers but no longer distinguishes accepted from rejected articles. The author’s “accepted” manuscript that is the focus of so-called Green Open Access policies may therefore no longer exist. Because of such ongoing change, mandating the free availability of preprints would be a straightforward and strategically astute policy for US funding agencies.

A preprint mandate would underscore the fundamental, often overlooked, point that it is the results of research to which the public should have access. The evaluation of that research by journals is part of an ongoing process of assessment that can take place after the results have been made openly available. Preprint mandates from the funders of research would also widen the possibilities for evolution within the system and avoid channeling it towards expensive APC-based publishing models. Furthermore, since articles on preprint servers can be accompanied by supplementary data deposits on the servers themselves or linked to data deposited elsewhere, preprint mandates would also provide mechanisms to accomplish the other important OSTP goal: availability of research data.

Richard Sever and John Inglis
Co-Founders, bioRxiv and medRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, NY11724

Harlan Krumholz and Joseph Ross
Co-founders, medRxiv
Yale University, New Haven, CT06520

Using SocArXiv to improve the impact of your conference paper

When you upload your conference paper, you give your audience the opportunity to engage with your work more seriously: read the paper, study the research materials you attach to it, and cite it — giving you formal precedence for your work and increasing its reach and impact. Later, if you publish it in a journal or some other venue, you can post a new version and people using the link will automatically be directed to the latest version (and see a link to the journal version, if there is one).

In addition, for the conference itself, you can use tags when you upload your paper to create communities of scholarship. Give it the ASA2021 tag for the American Sociological Association conference, for example. Then people can browse all the open uploaded conference papers as they prepare the schedules, at this link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/discover?q=tags%3A(%22ASA2021%22).

Or, get the members of your panel to all use a tag like ASA2021-101 (for session 101, e.g.), and give out this URL for a link to all the papers: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/discover?q=tags%3A(%22ASA2021-101%22).

(To make your own tag link, just go to SocArXiv.org, enter tags:("your tag") in the search bar, and copy the URL on the results page.)

If you give out a link directly to your paper, or a tag to your panel session, before the conference, you encourage a deeper level of engagement during your session, and your signal your embrace of transparent and accountable social science. (You can also upload your slides in the associated project if you want to share those.) Then, share a link directly to your paper, or all the papers, at the session itself.

Scholarship communities

Beyond one conference, this simple tagging allows for relatively spontaneous grouping of scholarship, as when someone says, “We need to organize the recent work on police violence,” and people start uploading and tagging their work. But it just as well facilitates more organized efforts. Just as such groupings use Twitter hashtags to pull people together, we can do the same thing with scholarship using SocArxiv. Groups that might benefit from this tool include:

  • Working groups on a research topic
  • Panels for an upcoming conference
  • Departments or groups within departments
  • Sections of the American Sociological Association or others
  • Scholar-activist groups

Any such group can simply share the instructions above and notify participants of the associated tag. The link to the tag will always generate a web page listing the associated papers.

This simple functionality is already very powerful, but we are always looking for ways to improve it and offer more options. People trying it out now will help with this development process. We hope you’ll try it out.

Don’t wait for your association to act

Yes, it would be better if the American Sociological Association (or other lagging associations) would provide SocArXiv’s level of service to conference participants, with archiving, DOIs, permanent links, versioning, commenting, and supporting materials. But you don’t have to wait for them to catch up. We provide this for free thanks to support from the University of Maryland Libraries, the nonprofit Center for Open Science, and the volunteers who work on our service.

With gift from MIT Libraries, SocArXiv offers 2019 SOAR awards

31301889864_0f9e0072b9_k
PNC photo / CC-BY-SA / https://flic.kr/p/PG3njh

With the support of a generous gift from MIT Libraries, SocArXiv is delighted to announce the 2019 Sociology Open Access Recognition awards. With SOAR, people who win paper awards from sections of the American Sociological Association — for papers posted on SocArXiv — will get $250 to help cover their travel to the conference in New York City this summer.

So, if you’ve submitted a paper to be considered for an American Sociological Association section award – including a graduate student award – consider posting it on SocArXiv as well. Any paper that is uploaded by April 15 and wins a 2019 ASA section award will receive a SOAR award of $250 in recognition of your achievement. Support open access, gain recognition, and win money all at the same time!

How it works

You upload your paper to SocArXiv by April 15. Once you find out you’ve won a section award, email socarxiv@gmail.com to notify us. We’ll send you a check for $250 to help cover your travel, as well as publicizing your paper and officially conferring a SOAR award. That’s the whole deal.

Sharing your paper through SocArXiv is a win-win. It’s good for you, because you get the word out about your research. It’s good for social science, because more people have access to ungated information. And now, with SOAR prizes for award-winning papers, it can be good for your wallet, too.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. What happens if I submitted a paper, but don’t notify SocArXiv it’s won a section award?

You will only receive a SOAR award if you let SocArXiv know at socarxiv@gmail.com by August 31, 2019 that your paper has won an ASA section award.

  1. What if I upload my paper after I win the section award?

Any papers uploaded by April 15, 2019 are eligible. We welcome later sharing of papers, but they will not be eligible for SOAR awards.

  1. Does the version submitted to SocArXiv have to be identical with the version submitted to the ASA section?

No. For example, if you upload to SocArXiv a pre-copyediting version of your published paper that you have permission to share, but send the award committee the published version, you are still eligible for the award.

  1. I’d love to upload my paper, but my copyright agreement doesn’t allow me to. What do I do?

First, you may still have the right to upload some version of the paper, even if it is not the final published version. Check your author agreement, or the Sherpa/ROMEO database for the preprint policies of many academic journals. If you really can’t share any version, you are unfortunately not eligible for a SOAR award. But keep in mind for next time that copyright agreements can often be edited or amended. You don’t have to give away all rights to your work.

  1. I am a graduate student submitting a paper for a graduate student section award. Am I still eligible?

Yes. ASA section awards for graduate student papers are also eligible for SOAR.

  1. I am submitting my paper for an award in another disciplinary association. Am I eligible for SOAR?

At present SOAR awards are limited to papers recognized by ASA sections. However, we are always interested in building partnerships with other organizations and disciplines. Please reach out to us at socarxiv@gmail.com if you are interested in developing a similar program for your organization.

Sociologists: Amend your agreements with ASA/Sage

open

By Philip N. Cohen

This is a followup to a previous post, and contains some duplication.

I have spoken well of the policy that permits authors to post preprint versions of their papers before submitting them to journals of the American Sociological Association. That means you can get your work out more broadly while it’s going through the review process. The rule says:

ASA authors may post working versions of their papers on their personal web sites and non-peer-reviewed repositories. Such postings are not considered by ASA as previous publication.

The policy goes on to ask that authors modify their posted papers to acknowledge publication if they are subsequently published. That’s all reasonable. This is why SocArXiv and other services offer authors the opportunity to link their papers to the DOI (record locator) for the published version, should it become available. This allows citation aggregators such as Google Scholar to link the records.

The problem

Unfortunately, the good part of this policy is undermined by the ASA / Sage author agreement that authors sign when their paper is accepted. It transfers the copyright of the paper to ASA, and sets conditions under which authors can distribute the paper in the future. The key passage here is this:

1. Subject to the conditions in this paragraph, without further permission each Contributor may …

  • At any time, circulate or post on any repository or website, the version of the Contribution that Contributors submitted to the Journal (i.e. the version before peer-review) or an abstract of the Contribution.
  • No sooner than 12 months after initial publication, post on any non-commercial repository or website the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication.

This is not good. It means that if you post a paper publicly, e.g., on SocArXiv, and then submit it to ASA, you can’t update it to the revised version as your paper moves through the process. Only 12 months after ASA publishes it can you update the preprint version to match the version that the journal approved.

This policy, if followed, would produce multiple bad outcomes.

One scenario is that people post papers publicly, and submit them to ASA journals for review. Over the course of the next year or so, the paper is substantially revised and eventually published, but the preprint version is not updated until a full year after that, often two years after the initial submission. That means readers don’t get to see the improved version, and authors have to live with people reading and sharing their unimproved work. This discourages people from sharing their papers in the first place.

In the other scenario, people update their preprints as the paper goes through the revision process, so they and their readers get the benefit of access to the latest work. However, when the paper is accepted authors are expected to remove from public view that revised paper, and only share the pre-review version. If this were feasible, it would be terrible for science and the public interest, as well as the author’s career interests. Of course, this isn’t really feasible — you can’t unring the bell of internet distribution (SocArXiv and other preprint services do not allow removing papers, which would corrupt the scholarly record.) This would also discourage people from sharing their papers in the first place.

The individual solution

Fortunately, you are a volitional agent in a free market information ecosystem, and you don’t have to just sign whatever PDF some corporate conglomerate puts in front of you. My suggestion is that you amend the agreement before you sign it. After receiving your acceptance, when the managing editor sends you the author agreement for your signature, politely notify the editor that you will be happy to sign the agreement with a minor amendment. Then strike through the offending text and add the amendment. I recommend the following text:

  • No sooner than 12 months after initial publication, post on any non-commercial repository or website the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication.
  • At any time, post to SocArXiv (a non-commercial, open-access repository) the version of the Contribution that was accepted for publication, with a DOI link and bibliographic reference to the published Contribution.

Then sign the agreement and return it. Here’s a visual depiction of the amendment:

sage amendment

Don’t panic! Yes, this publication may be the last thing standing between you and tenure or a better job. But the journal will not cancel your publication when you do this. The very worst thing that will happen is they will say “No!” Then you can roll over and accept the original agreement. (After the dust settles, I’d love it if you let me know this happened.) People amend these agreements all the time. Give it a try!

Here’s the relevant passage in “Alice’s Restaurant” (@ 14:32)

And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation,

And if you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into The shrink wherever you are, just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.” And walk out.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony – they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out.

And friends they may think it’s a movement And that’s what it is, the Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar. With feeling.

Fix the policy

So, what possible reason can there be for this policy? It is clearly intended to punish the public in order to buttress the revenue stream of Sage, which returns some of its profits to ASA, at the expense of our libraries, which pay for subscriptions to ASA journals.

I assume this policy is never enforced, as I’ve never heard of it, but I don’t know that for a fact. It’s also possible that whoever wrote the Publications policy I linked above didn’t realize that it contradicted the Sage author agreement, which basically no one reads. I also assume that such a policy does not in fact have any effect on Sage’s profits, or the profits that it kick backs to ASA. So it’s probably useless, but if it has any effects at all they’re bad, by discouraging people from distributing their work. ASA should change this author agreement.

I just got elected to the ASA Publications Committee, so I will add making this change to my platform, which I outlined here. I’m not optimistic about making policy changes at ASA in the current environment, but I am sure that the more people who join in the individual efforts, the greater our chances will be.

Call for Papers: Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences, 2018

io3s-logo_color-cropped

October 18-19, 2018

University of Maryland, College Park

SocArXiv will host the second O3S: Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences symposium on October 18 and 19, 2018 at University of Maryland, College Park. The symposium will (a) highlight research that uses the tools and methods of open scholarship; (b) bring together researchers who work on problems of open access, publishing, and open scholarship; and (c) facilitate exchange of ideas on the development of SocArXiv.

The symposium will feature two keynote speakers: Elizabeth Popp Berman, associate professor of sociology at University at Albany, SUNY; and April Hathcock, Scholarly Communications Librarian at New York University.

We invite social science papers or presentations related to the following themes:

  1. Research on any topic that includes open scholarship components. This may entail a demonstration case showing how to do an open scholarship project, providing data and code for results, working with collaborators, or other examples of open scholarship in practice.
  2. Research about open scholarship itself. This may include mechanisms for making data and code public, workflow processes, publication considerations, citation metrics, or the tools and methods of open scholarship.
  3. Research about replication and transparency. This includes both replication studies and research about replication and reproducibility issues.

Submissions are due by June 30, 2018.

Submissions may include papers or other project materials. E-mail presentation information to socarxiv@gmail.com. Include the following information:

  • Names of author(s)/presenter(s) and contact information.
  • For non-paper presentations, include a brief description and rationale explaining how the paper fits within the themes and goals of the O3S Symposium.
  • For paper submissions, upload your paper to SocArXiv and tag it #O3S18.
  • Any AV needs beyond a laptop/projector.
  • Travel stipends of $1,000 will be available to a limited number of presenters. Please indicate whether you would like to be considered for a travel award.

Presenters will be notified of the status of their submission via e-mail.

Visit the conference page and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for information and updates. Anyone interested in open scholarship and SocArXiv is welcome to attend O3S. Registration will include a nominal fee. Information will be coming soon!  

O3S is generously sponsored by the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Psychology,  and the University Libraries at the University of Maryland.

What Is SocArXiv?

SocArXiv, open archive of the social sciences, is a partner of the nonprofit Center for Open Science (COS) and is housed at the University of Maryland. SocArXiv provides a free and publicly accessible platform for social scientists to upload working papers, pre-prints, published papers, data, and code. SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication.  Since the development of SocArXiv was first announced in July 2016, researchers have deposited more than 2,100 papers.

Grand challenges for open scholarship

scihubinabox
In his keynote address, Joi Ito showed a picture of a briefcase holding the contents of Sci-Hub (tens of millions of papers), en route to India, where they may end up being legally distributed to teachers and students.

MIT Libraries just hosted a Grand Challenges summit on Information Science and Scholarly Communication. It comprised three 1.5-day workshops on (1) scholarly discovery, (2) digital curation and preservation, and (3) open scholarship (described here). The director of MIT Libraries, Chris Bourg, is on SocArXiv’s steering committee, and I was invited to participate in the open scholarship workshop, so we were well represented (participant list).

The workshops focused on defining core challenges and proposing a research agenda to address them in a 7- to 10-year time frame. This builds on MIT’s Task Force of the Future of Libraries report, among other efforts. The organizers and participants will produce a report on this agenda in the next few months; we’ll report back.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight one of the recommended readings, a paper by Micah Altman (the libraries’ director of research) and Marguerite Avery, “Information wants someone else to pay for it: Laws of information economics and scholarly publishing.” It’s an excellent introduction to the problem of markets in scholarly publishing, very approachable for social scientists interested in the political economy of what the jargon calls the “scholarly communication ecosystem.”

In general, the trends in scholarly communication are more, more and more. In 2011, the value of the market in 2011 was estimated to be $23.5 billion. But there is one area in which the trend is “less” and that is in market competition. Although the number of publications and journals is expanding at approximately three percent a year, and the market is expanding at four percent, the number of mergers and acquisitions over the past three decades have dramatically decreased the diversity of and competition among publishers. Today, following the recent merger of MacMillan and Springer, the market is dominated by a handful of companies: Pearson, Reed Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, Thomson/Reuters and Wolters Kluwer. These companies happen to be the top four publishing companies globally as well. And this is the culmination of a long-term trend: over the last three decades, there has been dramatic consolidation in the scholarly publishing industry. Profit margins are commensurately high, with some credible estimates of Elsevier’s profit margin as high as thirty-seven percent. Thus far, there are no signs that the general expansion of the content, contributors, and audience for scholarly outputs has countered this decline in competition.

The paper offers explanations for this failure of market competition, concluding:

Even in the long run, economic theory itself predicts that left to the market, too little knowledge will be created, too little used, and access to too much of what is available will be controlled by a small group of distributors.

They further caution that openness itself — especially defined only as free-to-read, does not a guarantee a system of “robust, sustainable scholarly communication.”

We may reach the point when the small number of for-profit companies that control academic publishing are able to describe their publishing output as “open access,” while simultaneously cementing their control over knowledge.

Finally, Altman and Avery offer a list of the “affordances” offered by current academic publications — the uses that different groups or institutions expect from them — and propose using new technology to unbundle these tasks, rather than presume they will remain bundled in the current, relatively ancient system of publication. This is a useful exercise for imagining future scholarly communication systems. Here is their table of affordances:

Table 1 from Altman & Avery 2015: DOI 10.3233/ISU-150775

One of my goals for the next year is assembling a curriculum on academic publishing, suitable for beginning social scientists and others interested in learning how this system works, the better to change it. This paper, and the work coming out of the MIT Grand Challenges summit, will be on the list. Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments, or send them to me at pnc@umd.edu.

SocArXiv media spotlight: Excess mortality in Puerto Rico

People walking in flood waters in Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sept. 22, 2017.
Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Sept. 22, 2017. Puerto Rico National Guard photo by Jose Ahiram Diaz-Ramos.

A paper by Alexis Santos and Jeffrey T. Howard, posted on SocArXiv, has received wide media attention, highlighting some of the advantages of using SocArXiv. The paper, “Estimates of excess deaths in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria,” was posted as a preprint before peer review.

The abstract reports a “descriptive finding” on excess deaths following Hurricane María for September and October. Using historical data from the Puerto Rico Vital Statistics system, the authors estimated expected deaths for each month. Then, using statements from the Puerto Rico Department of Public Safety, they compared the number of deaths for September and October 2017 to those from previous years, taking variability into account. The difference between their estimates of actual deaths in 2017 and the high-end estimates for those months was 518 deaths for September and 567 deaths for October. They conclude that mortality on the island “may exceed the current official death toll by a factor of 10.”

The preprint has been cited and linked from articles in the New York Times, Vox, and Huffington Post, and other media sources. As of December 10 it has been downloaded from SocArXiv 1,333 times (and viewed in the browser window many more times than that).

Santos, who goes by @AppDemography on Twitter, is an active public scholar who previously posted a paper on SocArXiv about possible climate change effects on life expectancy in Europe.

This is a good best-practices story for several reasons.

  • There is an urgent need to understand the impact of the hurricane on Puerto Rico. The paper is not peer-reviewed, but it is ready to be distributed widely. The methods are clear and transparent. The media reporting now permits other scholars the opportunity to read and react to the paper publicly. It now appears the Santos and Howard estimates are in line with other calculations, and the paper contributes to an emerging consensus about the storm’s impact.
  • By posting the paper on SocArXiv and sharing it with the media from there, Santos was able to provide a persistent link to an open paper, time-stamped and linked with his profile page (which includes links to his ORCID ID, Google Scholar, and other accounts).
  • In addition to the persistent link on SocArXiv, the paper has a DOI associated with it. The Google Scholar link takes readers directly to the SocArXiv version, and is now recording citations to the paper. SocArXiv also preserves and makes availale the version record for the paper.
  • As a project on the Open Science Framework (which each SocArXiv paper automatically becomes), the paper may be easily associated with supporting documentation and research materials.
  • Finally, if the paper in some later version is published in a journal, the authors will have the opportunity of providing a forward-linking DOI on the SocArXiv page, so that readers will be directed to the journal site.

We’re delighted to see SocArXiv working as intended!

Authority, openness, and the soft sciences

Photo of water drop splashing
Openness is beautiful but also vulnerable (photo PNC)

At our O3S conference, Tina Fetner said something that struck me, and with her permission I’m elaborating on it here.

Why is open scholarship more advanced, as a movement and as a set of norms, in the non-social sciences? The most important preprint archive is Arxiv, which started in math and physics. The biggest new preprint archive is bioRxiv, for the biological sciences, which is currently adding about 40 papers per day. There are important developments in the social sciences, including of course SocArXiv, but also PsyArxiv for psychology (although they are a pretty sciency social science); but these are still incipient relative to the big archives. And in open access academic publishing, the leader is PLOS (the Public Library of Science) which covers “all areas of science and medicine,” but doesn’t handle much social science (out of 190,000 papers, I count 14% tagged as social science, and 4% are tagged sociology, many of which are about health topics).

Of course not all scientists, or scientific disciplines, are leading the open movement. In chemistry and medicine, for example – and other fields where there is major commercial gain to be made from secrecy – openness is not all the rage.

But in the case of biology, where openness is taking off, could it be that the scientists are more oriented toward scientific processes than social scientists are, and so the issues of reproducibility and transparency are closer to the philosophy of their training? Or that they are more used to collaborating in teams that evolve over the course of their careers, so they are used to sharing? I don’t know, but I’d like to hear suggestions.

We hear you

Tina offered this suggestion: Maybe social scientists – and especially those in the softer social sciences – are reluctant to open up their work because they risk more by engaging with people outside their fields. This might be because our authority is more precarious.

Think about language. When physicists or engineers use language that only they understand, it’s not “jargon,” it’s “technical.” But social scientists are usually talking about things that are meaningful and interpretable to people outside of their disciplines. When sociologists use fancy words they seem obnoxious to lay readers. If a female social scientists refers to how “gender is socially constructed,” or uses the term “neoliberalism,” a dozen men with maybe one undergraduate course in sociology between them will gladly step in to explain why she’s an idiot (and worse). This doesn’t happen to mathematicians. (It also happens to White men much less than it does to women and minority scholars, which works in the average mathematician’s favor.)

When social scientists take their work public – which many of us are extremely keen to do – the risks we face are different from those in the sciency sciences. Our authority is more tenuous the more our work approaches intelligibility to non-experts. And the incentive to attack us increases as our work becomes more critical, and more critical of those with more to lose from our work.

One response to this weaker authority is to lean more heavily on formal legitimacy. Sociologists may be more insistent on formal titles than mathematicians for this reason (again, plus gender and race/ethnicity). And they might be more trepidatious about sharing work widely that has not been peer reviewed, or published by a high status journal or academic publishing house. These are reasonable responses.

It is our mission through SocArXiv to open up the research process and its products. But we know that this goal entails risks, and that those risks are not equitably distributed. We persist despite this recognition not because we discount the risks and concerns, but because we think social science is too important to give up in the face of them.

We want to help

Our approach to openness needs to be flexible and inclusive. It’s good to be tenacious, but not dogmatic. We believe that openness makes our work better, faster, more efficient, and more inclusive. The challenge is to move in that direction without incurring costs that are greater than those benefits. And we think we can do that.

Opening up our work allows us to better build collaborative networks for intellectual, social, and political support. By sharing with each other, we can make the enterprise of social science stronger partly because the work will be better, and partly because we will have a greater pool of shared resources on which to draw in response to the opposition we may face from skeptical or hostile publics. Of course, this is easier said than done, but that’s the basis for our optimism on openness.

That’s why we created SocArXiv, but SocArXiv is not a social movement or a political party; there is no ideological test for entry. It’s a tool and a platform that we can use to make our work better. We want to help you use it to make your work better, too, and we’d love to hear from you how we can do that together.