Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Why

Open Science is important for different reasons and for different beneficiaries.

For the general public

For the general public Open Science produces accelerated knowledge creation, increased transparency in academia, public and global access to research funded by taxpayer money, mitigating inequalities in access to knowledge but also in participation in science and scholarship, citizen science.

For researchers

Knowledge is very rarely, if ever, produced in isolation. In reality, building on each others’ resources is an absolute precondition of research. We routinely build our analysis on text corpora created by others, interlink heterogeneous collections of digital or analogue information objects to establish hidden connections between them, enrich digital collections or use scholarly databases in our discovery practices. As Gregory Crane concludes in his seminal writing from 2015, it is the future and the future well-being of our scholarship is at stake if we choose to keep putting our work in expensive and closed paper-based volumes instead of making the underlying resources available digitally.

Sharing widely, and more than just final publications, from your research processes has been proven to have lots of positive effects. Apart from complying with your institutional or funder's policy, it can bring new collaborations and recognition of more and more in-depth aspects of your research. On the other hand, enabling such building blocks and working with sharing in mind from the beginning of the project comes with changes in project design and documentation.

On the other hand, working with sharing in mind from the beginning of the project comes with changes in project design and documentation. This document aims to guide you though all what it involves.

For teachers

Open Science allows you to have open workflows and materials at your disposal and it contributes to open a much broader window on your field of inquiry, or phenomenon you are passionate about.

All openly shared scholarly or educational resources contribute to a more sustainable, more connected and community-driven models of scholarly production that goes far beyond the traditional paper-based ways of doing research and as such, powerfully mitigate social, geographical, disciplinary etc. disparities in access to knowledge.

For students

As a student, having Open Access to publications means that you don't need to cross physical borders (institutional or broader geographical ones) to overcome virtual ones such as paywall any more - neither during a pandemic nor in more normal times. On the other hand, we no longer produce only scholarly outputs that can be placed on a bookshelf. Research outputs now encompass far more than what can be expressed in the 17th century construct of the research paper. Digital artifacts and digital critical editions, installations, video essays, rich multimedia, applications, websites, software, interactive visualizations, know-hows, workflows etc. are first class citizens in an open research culture and scholars and students deserve to be given credit for the many contributions they make above and beyond the articles. In this sense, Open Science or the open research culture is about having the ability to look over our colleagues' shoulders, to better understand, better follow what they’re, doing, the whole process step-by-step.

For publishers

As a publisher with Open Access you have a broader outreach and increased visibility; compliance with a strong and increasingly global policy drive; evidence for making digital Open Access versions available does not necessarily negatively affect sales prices (see also evidence in the Swiss context here). In addition to digital, Open Access publications, print-on demand is here to stay: scholarly and non-scholarly communities interact in different ways with the print and the digital book instances but we interact with them in both ways.

For the general public

For researchers

For teachers

For students

For publishers

Further reading