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

Abstract

Use and reuse of research materials such as data and code are central themes of open science policies. Funding agencies, publishers, and researchers increasingly expect research products to be publicly available in order to promote scientific reproducibility and maximize benefits derived from funded research. Data and code are of particular interest for several reasons: the complexity of workflows and the opacity of analytical tools in computational science often invites skepticism and a corresponding demand for transparency; the perceived "softness" of data and code suggests appealing opportunities for adaptation and innovation; further, open science practices often treat research data and code as fungible and portable commodities. The underlying assumptions of open science (for example, that reuse is inherently good) are rarely questioned, however. Little attention has been given to the burdens, risks, and failures of open science.

This session includes papers that enrich, complicate, and problematize the values of use and reuse in open science. Potential questions to explore include: Whose interests are served in promoting open science, and at what expense? In what ways is it problematic to repurpose and adapt data and code in new contexts? When does reuse verge on misuse? What does reuse look like in practice and what forms of value can be expected to emerge from it (and not)? Finally, how should the distinction between use and reuse be conceptualized in the first place?

Individual Presentations

• How I Learned What a Research Parasite Was - Andrew Staver Hoffman, iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen

• Open Science as a Value-Driven, Cyberinfrastructure Supported Ethos - Johanna Cohoon, UT Austin School of Information

• Who Pays the Costs of Free and Open-Source Scientific Software? - R. Stuart Geiger, UC-Berkeley Institute for Data Science; Dorothy Roe Howard, UC San Diego Department of Communication & Design Lab; Lilly Irani, University of California, San Diego; Nelle Varoquaux, University of California, Berkeley; Alexandra Paxton, University of Connecticut; Chris Holdgraf, University of California, Berkeley

• The Use, to Use and the User: A Production of “Uses” from Action to Actor - Maxime Harvey, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Session Organizers

• Seth Erickson, Penn State University

• Irene Pasquetto, UCLA

• Peter Darch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign