Infrastructuring Open Science

The Open Science (OS) agenda has potentially massive cultural, organizational and infrastructural consequences. Ambitions for OS-driven policies have proliferated, within which researchers are expected to publish their scientific data. Significant research has been devoted to studying the issues associated with managing Open Research Data. Data curation , as it is typically known, seeks to assess data management issues to ensure its long-term value and encourage secondary use. Hitherto, relatively little interest has been shown in examining the immense gap that exists between the OS grand vision and researchers’ actual data practices.

With my research, I aim to examine research data practices in interdisciplinary ethnographically-driven before systematic attempts at curation are made. Interdisciplinary ethnographically-driven contexts – quite understudied in the literature – offer a perspicuous opportunity to understand the data curation and Research Data Management (RDM) issues that can problematize uptake. I expect to identify what kind of meanings researchers attribute to their research data practices and in which ways those meanings influence collaboration and sharing in interdisciplinary contexts.

My research project is run within the frame of the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” and, in particular, it is connected to the INF project. Through a close collaboration with ZIMT, the IT service provider of the University of Siegen, the scope of my project is to develop an appropriate information infrastructure for sustainable research data management practices, which might enable data sharing, long-term preservation and data re-use. The socio-technical study and design of collaborative research infrastructure under the auspice of the Open Science agenda is a core aspect of the subproject INF and of my own research.

It is important to highlight that the DFG – as funding agency – wishes to promote future cooperative research activities at a national and international level, and it carries an expectation that results of the INF project will provide a basis for systematic data management “best practices”. In fact, the main data curation principles of long-term data preservation and the sharing of materials with a wider public formed part of the original CRC proposal for the research being undertaken. With this research, I aim to go beyond the institutionalization of research infrastructure and rather investigating scientific research practices “on the ground”. In particular, I seek to explore in which socio-technical contexts research data are produced and eventually shared across different fields.

• Gaia Mosconi, Qinyu Li, Jana Barutzky, Matthias Korn, Dave Randall, Helena Karasti, Peter Tolmie, Volkmar Pipek (2019). Three gaps in Opening Science. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing (JCSCW), 28 (3–4), pp. 749–789, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-019-09354-z
• Gaia Mosconi, Matthias Korn, Christian Reuter, Peter Tolmie, Maurizio Teli, Volkmar Pipek (2017) From Facebook to the Neighborhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Commitment. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The Journal of Collaborative Computing (JCSCW) 26 (4-6), pp. 959-1003 , doi: 10.1007 / s10606-017-9291-z

• “Three Gaps in Opening Science” paper presentation at the 17th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Salzburg (Austria) June 8 – June 12 2017
• “Open science, data practices and infrastructure: a multidimensional empirical account”, as part of the Lecture Series “Data Practices”, University of Siegen, 20th November 2018
• “From Facebook to the Neighborhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Commitment” paper presentation at the 15th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Sheffield (UK) August 28 – September 01 2017

• Research Tech Lab: main coordinator and organizer since September 2017