Open Science | Ethics

Transparency, reproducibility, reusability and open communication are regarded as the fundamental principles of Open Science. Committing to Open Science means countering the artificial restriction of access to knowledge (e.g. through commercial paywalls) with freely accessible alternatives. In most cases, a more detailed distinction is made between six principles, as is the case, for example, on the University of Konstanz website:

1. Open Access: unrestricted and free access to scientific information.
2. Open Educational Resources: creating and using free and open resources for education and university teaching.
3. Open Data: making collected, created, calculated and aggregated data freely available.
4. Open Source: using open-source technology (software and hardware) and making one’s own technology open source.
5. Open Peer Review: Transparent and traceable quality assurance through open peer review processes.
6. Open Methodology: Documenting the methods used and the entire process behind them, as far as is practicable and relevant.

Ideas and knowledge should be freely available in accordance with the fundamental principles of Open Science. On the other hand, many scholars in the humanities and social sciences have developed a strong ‘sense of ownership’: my topic, my research, my research landscape, my contacts. However, science relies both on the original ideas of individuals and on collaboration and exchange. Yet because ideas can certainly be ‘stolen’ and even appropriated through competing research funding, the relationship between openness and intellectual property is anything but free of conflict.

Added to this are further inequalities between different academic centres: Western academic landscapes are often better equipped with funding opportunities, but also with symbolic and social capital. The latter includes prestige, influential networks and language skills. When research is conducted in and on regions such as South-Eastern Europe, local researchers often have more direct access to knowledge and a knowledge advantage; however, they also frequently face structural disadvantages, lower prestige, poorer funding opportunities or reduced visibility within the international academic community.

Language barriers also sometimes prove to be obstacles within unequal power relations. Not every original thought can be articulated in English, the international lingua franca of the academic world. This may be even more true for the non-academic public, who may have a direct interest in research findings but may, when relying on translation software, only arrive at distorted results.

The following questions should be taken into account by those involved in this research project as a matter of personal commitment:

• Who has made what contribution?
• Who is originally behind an idea that is subsequently adopted?
• How should one deal with situations where two or more people are working independently on the same topic?
• What role do life experiences, as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, play in research?
• What is the (power) relationship between non-local and local researchers?

In each case, a unique answer must be found to these questions. The following principles should be adopted as a commitment:

• Openness to the achievements and contributions of others,
• Reflection on one’s own role,
• Willingness to cooperate and exchange ideas,
• Fairness through the acknowledgement of academic contributions from the academic landscape of South-Eastern Europe,
• Efforts towards multilingualism, particularly on the part of non-local researchers.

On this site, all static pages will gradually be translated into Bosnian and English. The aim is to recruit one or two project partners from Bosnia and Herzegovina who can actively help shape the site in their primary language. Blog posts will be written in the preferred language of the respective authors. They can and s

Open Science means being open to contributions from others. Anyone interested in contributing their own texts, photographs or other materials is invited, subject to consultation and agreement with the project leader, to submit contributions that relate to one of the four research areas connected with Krivaja. Theoretical essays or reviews are also welcome, provided they can establish links to the research areas and questions.

For more details, see: Submit a contribution.

This project endeavours to adhere to academic standards. Not all contributions are academic texts, although they may form part of the Open Science process. A distinction is made between two categories:

A) short, fragmentary, sketch-like blog posts and field notes; event announcements, conference reports, translations from the press;

and

B) in-depth / essay-style / academic / translated academic articles; interviews, profiles, etc.

Contributions from Category A) do not always include references, footnotes or adhere to academic standards in the broader sense. A field note, for example, may reflect personal impressions, contain thoughts in the style of a public blog post, or raise open questions that may later be discarded or answered differently.

For contributions from Category B), adherence to academic standards is required, whether for original or guest contributions. Guest contributions are always reviewed prior to publication, and standards are required which are defined in more detail on the Submit a contribution page.

For practical reasons, open peer review does not mean that contributions undergo a double-blind peer review process. However, the same standards should be applied as those applicable to the submission of academic articles to specialist journals or to presentations at an academic colloquium.

In all cases, including for contributions in Category A, image rights and any data used must be cited correctly, transparently and verifiably. Where accessible and verifiable open-source sources are available, these should be preferred to restricted sources that are behind paywalls, which make verification difficult and contravene contemporary open-access standards.

Every author publishes under their real name and bears personal responsibility for adhering to academic standards and for the accuracy of the data provided. By submitting a contribution, every author declares that they have produced the work independently and have taken into account the image and copyright of others.

To ensure the greatest possible transparency and to safeguard authors’ rights, these articles are published under one or more real names on the website www.Krivaja.org.

Guest authors give their consent for the content they provide to be marked with the CC BY seal.

The CC BY badge means that any article may be redistributed online and in print, provided the author(s) are credited and a link to the licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en is included (including for commercial purposes and in modified form). Contributions to the Open Science Blog and the static pages will be marked with the following or a similar addition:

This contribution by NAME* from the Open Science project Krivaja – A more-than-human framework is licensed under CC-BY and may be reused in accordance with the terms of this free licence.

This licence is also used by Wikipedia and the Hypotheses editorial blog (unless otherwise stated in specific cases) and is regarded as the gold standard of open access.

It is envisaged and encouraged that participants will act as editors and/or authors of one or more monographs, an edited volume or other publications – such as articles for specialist journals – arising from this research project.

If material that has been first published on the Open Science Blog is used in publications, the name(s) of the author(s) of the material used, as well as the name of the Open Science Blog and its editor (currently Dr Thomas Schad), must be cited.

Translations of articles previously published in other languages are also considered to be first publications.

Open Science, science blogging, public history and other forms of open science are often viewed with scepticism by advocates of traditional scientific formats, as the removal of gatekeepers undoubtedly carries risks in terms of quality assurance.

Added to this is the factor of artificial intelligence (AI), which not only makes plagiarism far more likely than ever before: Science bloggers also report that the visibility of their own posts has plummeted since the advent of AI, because the content they produce is merely consumed and processed by LLL models without the original source being displayed as a link in the search results (see Isabel Steinhardt’s post on de.hypotheses).

These and other problems require policy solutions that cannot be provided here.

Although AI is used by the author (or authors) of this research project as a research tool, it is not used to generate texts. All blog posts and articles are written independently, although they may refer to content that was not found through research in libraries, archives or ‘traditional’ desktop searches on search engines, but is instead the result of AI prompts. In every case, however, only knowledge that is verifiable and can be identified as the actual source of the AI-LLL model is cited.

Translation software presents a special case when it comes to the use of AI. In this project, DeepL and (to a lesser extent) LibreTranslate are primarily used. Translations produced using this software are revised by the project manager. The use of DeepL is mentioned here and in the legal notice, but not under every post that has been translated and further processed using DeepL.

This Open Science project is also based on sensitive, personal data obtained through anthropological and ethnographic methods. Whilst violent events and experiences such as the Bosnian War (1992–1995) are not the central focus of the research questions, they do play a significant role. The fact that, in many cases, both perpetrators and victims are still alive means that, in some instances, it is not possible to name the informants.

Nor should ethnographic field notes – some of which are published on this research blog under the category Field Notes – be regarded as hermetic intellectual property: the knowledge of other people and social contexts, as well as interaction within them, always plays a role, as the European Association of Social Anthropologists emphasises:

These principles highlight how ethnographic research materials – including fieldnotes – are co-produced through relations of trust – between the researcher and her interlocutors – and through the interpretative work of the researcher (Koning et al. 2019: 2). These relations of trust come with implications for the guardianship of ethnographic materials produced within research teams.

https://easaonline.org/guidelines/

The field notes should therefore mention the contributions of the people involved, based on a reasonable assessment, even if this does not necessarily mean naming them by their real names. The guidelines of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, which this project follows, can be read in more detail here and serve as a guide.

The Open Science blog Krivaja is self-hosted. The data centre is located in Germany. As with all other projects in the research project trilogy Hermannova: Grounded Theory from Berlin and Bosnia, the open-source software programmes WordPress, LibreOffice and Zotero are used. Contributions may also be submitted using proprietary software, provided that it is compatible with LibreOffice.

The Science Blog features a comments section that can be used by readers and other authors. For security reasons, the comments section is moderated by the project lead.

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