Open Platforms: Toolboxes for Open Research

Hello, and welcome to this short talk about Open Platforms. Platforms bring together technologies, processes, and conventions for their users: open platforms introduce aspects of openness to some or all of these dimensions. In this session, we will begin by introducing some familiar platforms from outside the research domain, describe how to recognise more “open” platforms, and then talk about using open platforms to do open research. The talk will highlight how the “openness” of open platforms is particularly useful for eliciting contributions, giving examples of research collaborations that have used open platforms and of a new open platform that is experimenting with fundamental changes to the way research is done.

To begin: Platforms outside of research

First, let’s think about some familiar platforms from outside the research sphere. These days, when we go online, we often access “platforms”, whether we notice it or not. For instance, Amazon is home to Amazon Marketplace, Google runs Google Cloud, and Facebook runs the Facebook Platform. These are all collections of integrated hardware and software technologies, business models, and cultural conventions which allow third parties to do things online: to buy and sell products, to run software services, or to access social network data. It is worth noticing that all these platforms are ‘open’ in some senses of the word: they “provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on.”

Further aspects of “openness” in open platforms

Some platforms have additional aspects of openness baked into their design, including open enrollment, open software, open governance, and a commitment to transparent operation more generally. Wikimedia, for example, exemplifies all of these aspects of openness. Not only can anyone with an internet connection edit the sites on the Wikimedia network, anyone with coding skills can get involved with improving the underlying wiki software; and anyone with time on their hands can get involved with operational work, or put themselves forward for leadership roles. This contrasts with the corporate platforms mentioned previously, which are more centrally controlled.

Open Platforms for open research

The openness of open platforms can make them attractive as sources of information about human behaviour. However, some open platforms are attractive to researchers for the more immediate practical reason that they have support for research as their primary practical focus. As such they are not just potential “research sites” but toolboxes for open research.

It’s useful to recall that any aspect of the research lifecycle can be more or less “open”. Research can be planned in public or behind closed doors; data can be collected centrally or by a distributed pool of contributors; and so on.

Some platforms only deal with one or a few of these phases. Rather than being a comprehensive survey of available platforms and their features, this talk aims to illustrate how the “openness” of open platforms can be helpful to researchers.

The openness of open platforms make them particularly useful for eliciting contributions

Some open platforms focus on sharing research results in a way that supports sharing and re-use (for example, “preprint platforms” achieve this). Some platforms focus on opening up the process in a way that helps people replicate a study after it’s been carried out (e.g., “Protocols.io is a secure open access platform for developing and sharing reproducible methods.”). Using tools like these can certainly change the way research works (for example, some researchers devote considerable time to keeping up with new preprints in their area of study). Platforms that open up other aspects of the research lifecycle can change who directly participates in a given research project. Let’s turn to a couple of examples of how open platforms have been used to elicit contributions to research-in-progress.

Example: OSF support for a large-scale research collaboration

The Open Science Framework (or OSF) describes itself as “a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration.” Many people use it to share preprints and reports, but it can also be used earlier in the research cycle. One flagship example was a collaboration between some 270 authors on an intensive review article called “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science”, which was subsequently published in Science. OSF was used to host and discuss the components of the paper — in the open — as they were being developed by contributing authors. Referring back to our research lifecycle keywords, the platform features particularly helped with the Process phase of work.

Example: Custom platform design to create a novel research site

Whereas the previous example used an online platform in an instrumental way, some research in computing explicitly focuses on exploring the properties of tools and platforms, themselves. For example, Bill Tomlinson led a 30-author contribution to CHI 2012 which looked at “Massively distributed authorship of academic papers”. In this case, the research was mostly qualitative, and based on a reflective exploration of “the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.” The platform was assembled by the paper’s contributors: co-authors were recruited via existing mailing lists, and a co-authoring space was set up using open source software. This time, tooling features were in place to support the Collect and Analyse phases, i.e., to gather observational data, and to help surface trends in that data.

Co-authoring and other forms of collaboration: new directions in open platforms

Both of these examples mentioned above describe contemporary co-authoring workflows involving quite a few co-authors. However, not only is the process of writing research papers evolving, the way we carry out basic research is itself slowly changing. For example, Octopus is “an open access platform where researchers can read, review and publish findings at all stages of the scientific process.” It is part of a broader trend of tools for sharing research, such as infrastructures for creating and sharing laboratory notebooks and data science notebooks are helping scientists do research in the open. The basic idea is that sharing ideas and preliminary results can foster discussion and collaboration, avoid redundancy, and accelerate progress (though there is more research needed to check these claims!).

Creating an open culture

Beyond the technical and resourcing considerations, there are various “soft” design features which should be considered when selecting or developing a research platform. While focusing on workplace issues, the 2020 Wellcome Trust Report on "What Researchers Think About the Culture They Work In" notes that researchers say that their working culture is best when it is collaborative, inclusive, supportive and creative. You could look for and seek to foster these qualities in collaborative platforms as well.

Even a platform that isn’t open in all senses (like Google Workplace) can be used in ways that are more or less open. For example, you can easily change your settings on Google Docs so that “Anyone on the Internet with the link can edit” or “Anyone on the Internet with the link can comment”.

Recent research also suggests that just about any form of co-authoring tends to lead to quality improvements and also to more citations, a finding which seems to be true across disciplines. While open platforms can be useful for various research-relevant purposes, as we discussed, some are particularly useful for eliciting contributions, and it is encouraging to know that this can lead to improvements in research quality. While open platforms can be useful for various research-relevant purposes, as we discussed, some are particularly useful for eliciting contributions, and it is encouraging to know that this can lead to improvements in research quality.

Links

• Open Science Framework (OSF)

• Octopus.ac

• Open lab notebooks

References

Shift Learning. (2020). What researchers think about the culture they work in. Wellcome Trust, London. https://wellcome.org/reports/what-researchers-think-about-research-culture

Nosek, B., et al. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. In Science (Vol. 349, Issue 6251). American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac4716

Tomlinson, B., et al. 2012. Massively distributed authorship of academic papers. CHI’12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 11–20. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2212776.2212779

Thelwall, M., Kousha, K., Abdoli, M., Stuart, E., Makita, M., Wilson, P., & Levitt, J. (2023). Why are coauthored academic articles more cited: Higher quality or larger audience?. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 74(7), 791-810.