Our Reasons to Blog

Open research essentially depends on transparency, reproducibility and accountability of the steps leading to the result. However, transparency and accountability do not necessarily only have to be implemented downstream and documented in the sense of a report. The two central values of open research can already stand in the foreground flanking the process.

It was therefore not difficult for us in the project team to set up a process-accompanying blog for this purpose. Here we want to share our questions, progress, detours, failures and successes.

Goals

We hope that by writing about our research and development process, we will be able to connect with the various communities that deal with our issues. First, the development and application communities of GitLab, OJS, Hypothesis and pandoc-scholar. On the other hand, there are the different scientific communities, for whom writing about their research is a natural part of their work.

In this blog we would like to explain how we imagine ways of writing, collaborating and publishing in digital times and hope for a fruitful discussion.

Central questions

In the center of our interest the following questions are complementary to the development of a concrete socio-technical system:

  • What do we mean by modern forms of publishing?
  • What opportunities and challenges does our technology stack (GitLab/OJS/Hypothesis/pandoc-scholar) offer for socio-technical writing and publication systems?
  • How do we ensure the quality of scientific publications in a proven and improved manner?
  • How can we implement and communicate the values of Open Science in our system?

Model and object at the same time

By blogging, we communicate about our object as well as about ourselves. Usually projects of this kind change the individuals involved and the team. We are similar to what Christian Heise (2017) described in his “Open Doctoral Thesis”, ethnographers of ourselves. What does it do to us to write openly about what we have in mind, what we have developed and what does not yet work? What does it do to us if the interested scientific community reacts to it and criticizes and stimulates us?

Languages and comments

In order to be internationally connectable, we have decided to write this blog also in English. To make this affordable, we will make use of AIs to help us translate.

In order to capture the feedback of our readers, we also rely on Hypothesis for the blog comments. With this we hope to make the tool better known and to identify possible stumbling blocks in integration and usability.

We are looking forward to the exchange with you!

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Axel Dürkop
Team leader, system architect and developer