Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Special flavours of the open research culture in Arts, Design and Music
Special flavours of the open research culture in Arts, Design and Music[edit]
Sharing knowledge and having one’s ideas circulated, recognized and engaged by others is at the heart of scholarly work. The Open Access, Open Science paradigms open new horizons in this respect as they bring about new ways of accessing, assessing, connecting and reusing research artifacts – reaching beyond the final publication and reaching beyond the walls of the university campus. Although this wave of innovation manifests itself in all research areas, certain disciplines and disciplinary needs (most notably those belonging under the umbrella of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM)) are better addressed and more extensively served than others. Such disparity threatens with serious consequences not only of epistemic kinds but it also paves the way of inequalities in complying with the burgeoning Open Access, open data mandates of research funders and institutions. We will soon have a world where all natural scientific publications are free to read, while arts and humanities scholarship will be paywalled.
Research "data" in Arts, Design and Music[edit]
The main challenges in opening up research in arts and design disciplines that the present guidelines address[edit]
The reason for this lies in the critical diversity of disciplinary cultures and community practices that are (yet) to be addressed in the transition towards the open research culture.
Legal, ethical, technical challenges associated with source materials[edit]
Research in arts and design disciplines does not start from a blank page. Instead, it unfolds around a rich media ecology and cultural artifacts (images, artworks, performance recordings, sheet music, print books etc.) that are deeply embedded in the cultural and social practices of the institutions that preserve, curate and (co)produce them. Their copyright clearance and assessment for reuse not only in legal an ethical terms, but also in terms of technicalities, is a robust challenge and necessary first step in opening up research workflows and publications. Therefore, when it comes to Open Access or Open Science, art and design scholars, teachers and students easily find themselves under the double pressure of negotiating for openness ‘backwards’, with the owners and curators of their source materials, while at the same time negotiating for openness ‘forwards’, with their publishers.
Publications themselves are artefacts[edit]
Speaking of this latter, another source of misalignment to the mainstream Open Access publication culture lies in its delayed attention (and solutions) towards academic books and their inherent diversity.
Long forms of scholarship in arts and design (monographs, anthologies, exhibition catalogues, and volumes of prints illustrating collections, pattern books, didactic works for art instruction etc.) are usually material artefacts themselves, unique, out of the box publications that come with the necessity to showcase their multimedia subjects in their richest possible representations. Stepping in the realms of the open and the digital, the main challenge is how to meaningfully turn their materiality and translating their richness in networked, digital solutions that spark inspiration and novel, deeper ways of engagement rather than resistance.