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

The importance of Open 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.