How I Learned What a Research Parasite Was

• In Event: Interrupting Open Science: Use, Reuse, and Misuse of Research Data and Code

Abstract

In domains as diverse as ecology and biomedicine, a number of scholarly publications over the past many years have pejoratively deployed the notion of ‘parasite’ to characterize researchers in the data-intensive sciences whose work entails the re-use of data -- typically collected by someone else, at some earlier moment, and used to answer an entirely different empirical question. Each time accusations of parasitism have been leveled, the implicated communities have taken to response pieces, blog posts, and to social media to debate and ironize on the claims. Following Howie Becker’s (1993) account of ‘how [he] learned what a crock was,’ the present paper applies a discourse analytic approach to this rich corpus of textual data to unpack the ‘invidious’ emic distinctions actors make between various other groups of actors amidst a wider push to make science more ‘open.’ In doing so, it outlines the multiple justifications mobilized in both parasitic critique and counter-critique. These, in turn, are suggestive of researchers’ interests and expectations about what they hope to get out of their engagements -- with themselves, with each other, and with their material environments -- in an increasingly data-driven world. To wit, the stakes of ‘research parasitism’ include (1) questions of shifting reward and incentive structures in scientific careers; (2) epistemic concerns about the quality and validity of science driven by data re-use, including ‘backwards science’; and (3) the (de)valuation of researchers’ locally emplaced knowledges in an era of datafication. But the question arises: is it not parasites all the way down?

Author

• Andrew Staver Hoffman, iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen