Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen - Abschlussbericht

I. Infos zum eigenen Forschungsvorhaben

A. Zusammenfassung und Ergebnisse

Beschreibe die abschließenden Ergebnisse deines Forschungsvorhabens anhand deiner individuellen Roadmap. Wurden die im Rahmen des Fellow-Programms formulierten Forschungsziele erreicht oder gab es Änderungen? Wenn ja, welche?

My project ended up being a mosaic of projects. The center (or the hub) of my project is my own website (philippejoly.net) where I documented my ideas and my progress in a series of blog posts. The posts cover topics such as the creation of a data management plan, the opportunities offered by the Open Science Framework, critical reflections on protest data, the difficulties of learning Git and GitHub, and the advantages of preprints.

An important element of my website is my vignette on “Using multiple imputation to improve the harmonization of repeated cross-national surveys”. The vignette introduces a technique for coping with the problem of systematically missing data in longitudinal social and political surveys. The procedure was implemented in R, a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing. The text and the code of the vignette were prepared in R markdown, a form of literate programming. Finally, all the material of the vignette is on my GitHub page, where users can clone the repository, comment, and suggest modifications.

During the last months, I finished writing a paper on protest in Eastern Germany and aimed at communicating my findings and my methodology following open science principles. This implied, first, circulating my paper as a preprint. The manuscript will appear simultaneously, in open access, as a WZB Discussion Paper and as a SocArXiv preprint. I have submitted the paper to colleagues of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) who are currently formatting the text. The preprint should be available at the beginning of June (hopefully, before the closing event of the fellowship). The preprint will be linked to an OSF project where code and data will be available to reproduce the statistical analysis. The code is already available on GitHub here.

Finally, on July 18, I will hold a workshop for PhD Candidates on open access in social sciences at the Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences. A draft outline of the workshop is available online.

These four elements represent only part of the objectives in my roadmap. I underestimated the time I would need to simply learn the skills (e.g., R and Git) required to realize my projects. My planned schedule for the publication of my papers was a posteriori not realistic. I started to lag behind schedule after deciding to revise profoundly one of my paper (new data, new method, new results). The revision of the paper also coincided with a new job at the WZB, which took a lot of my time available for the fellowship. This all pushed back other elements of my project.

B. Beitrag zu Offener Wissenschaft

Welchen Beitrag zu Offener Wissenschaft hat dein Forschungsprojekt geleistet? Bitte beschreiben.

The project nonetheless makes a valuable contribution to open science. The blog, in itself, is a case study of a social scientist opening up his research. The topics covered are of interest for a broad community in social sciences. The vignette combines many elements of open science: it fits in the broad category of OER material and the analysis is fully reproducible as it follows an approach of literate programming with open source software. The vignette is under a CC-BY license and speaks to a large group of social scientists working with repeated cross-national surveys. The paper (preprint and replication material) diffuses early research findings and a reproducible method to analyze generational change in protest participation. The workshop will offer a group of PhD candidates from all around the world insights about open access publishing. The material of the workshop will be made available so that participants can further diffuse the content in their own institutions.

II. Zusammenarbeit mit Fellows und Mentor*innen

A. Zusammenarbeit mit deiner Mentorin/deinem Mentor

Wie regelmäßig fand ein Austausch statt? Wie/ über welche Kanäle habt ihr kommuniziert? Wie hilfreich war der Austausch für dich/ dein Forschungsvorhaben? Was hättest du dir für die Zusammenarbeit noch gewünscht?

My mentor, Katja Mayer, and I started the fellowship by calling each other once a month. However, the frequency of our calls declined over the last months. This was my fault. I had to cancel calls, first, because of health issues and, then, because I judged my progress insufficient. I had difficulties dividing my work into small steps that I could report to my mentor and felt overwhelmed by the revision of my paper, which had to be completed before moving on with other projects. Nonetheless, we kept a regular email correspondence.

I highly appreciated Katja’s comments. She always attracted my attention to new aspects of my work which could be made open. Coming from a different epistemological background, she also stimulated new critical reflections on my data and my methods. Her comments were pragmatic. She was able to put herself in the shoes of an outsider looking at my work for the first time. This way, she rapidly identified aspects of my projects that had to be clarified.

I only regret not having arranged my work differently so as to have more regular exchanges with Katja.

B. Austausch mit anderen Fellows

Inwiefern fand ein Austausch mit den anderen Fellows statt? Wie/ über welche Kanäle habt ihr kommuniziert? Wie hilfreich war der Austausch für dich/ dein Forschungsvorhaben? Was hättest du dir für die Zusammenarbeit gewünscht?

Unfortunately, exchanges with the other fellows have been rather limited. Since March, our Slack group is barely used. With a few exceptions like the preparation of the open access checklist for PhD candidates, emails have dealt more with organization than content. Twitter (#fellowsfreieswissen) appears to be the main channel through which we learn about each others activities.

I still appreciated our exchanges. It was motivating to see what the others were doing. Learning about their projects encouraged me to adopt tools like Git and GitHub in spite of challenges. I also heard about events and new publications on open science.

Although I regret that there were not more exchanges, it is hard to think of a different way to organize our communications. We cannot force anyone to join a social media and, since we are spread across Germany and Austria, meetings are more difficult. We could maybe think of a “Berlin Open Science Stammtisch” because a sufficient number of (ex-)fellows and mentors are based in the German capital. When appropriate, we could also consider fellows working together as a team on certain projects.

III. Kommunikation und Vernetzung

A. Kommunikationsaktivitäten mit Bezug zum Fellow-Programm

Welche Kommunikationsaktivitäten mit Bezug zum Fellowprogramm/ Offene Wissenschaft (Vorträge, Workshops, Fachbeiträge, Blogposts) hast du initiiert? Bitte beschreiben.

As explained in part I, I am organizing a workshop with PhD Candidates on open access in social sciences at the Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences.

Also, as detailed previously, I will make available a WZB Discussion Paper (published also as a SocArXiv preprint) at the beginning of June. The paper is entitled “Generations and Protest in Eastern Germany: Between Revolution and Apathy.” Using age-period-cohort models with data from the European Social Survey, the analysis assesses the evolution of gaps in protest across generations and time between East and West Germans. The preprint will be linked to a replication set (already available on GitHub) that will allow other scholars to reproduce my findings and reuse the age-period-cohort models in other contexts.

Finally, I have published a series of blog posts related to my project. Since September, my website has had more than 8000 visits. See:

Creating a data management plan (November 2017);
A look at the Open Science Framework (December 2017);
Some reflections on the availability, reliability, and replicability of protest data (January 2018);
Vignette: Improving the harmonization of repeated cross-national surveys with the R mice package (March 2018);
Learning Git the wrong way (April 2018);
Dear editor, what is your preprint policy? (May 2018).

B. Weitergabe von Wissen

Konntest du dein Wissen über Offene Wissenschaft an deiner oder an einer anderen wissenschaftlichen Einrichtung (z. B.: über Teilnahme an Veranstaltungen, eigene Vorträge oder Workshops, Gespräche mit Kolleginnen und Kollegen) weitergeben oder auf das Thema Offene Wissenschaft aufmerksam machen? Bitte beschreiben.

Was hat dabei gut funktioniert? Wo gab es Barrieren/Hindernisse?
Wo hättest du mehr Unterstützung von Mentorinnen und Mentoren und/oder seitens Wikimedia (z. B. Materialien) benötigt?

I attended the Open Science Forum 2018 at Humboldt University in January, where we discussed open science projects currently running at the university and plans for the creation of a federal open science infrastructure (NFDI). I also had many informal discussions with colleagues at HU and at the WZB on the topic of open science.

There is a growing acceptance for open science principles in my institutions. Yet, a change of culture is still necessary. For many people in political science and sociology, open science is seen as something that can be “added on” to their current practices rather than being the silver thread of their work. Researchers feel that by opening up their research before it is published, they risk being scooped. Open science is often seen a luxury, which one cannot always afford under time pressure and with limited resources.

The difficulties of implementing open science principles in my institutions manifested themselves differently within the groups of positivist-quantitative and interpretativist-qualitative researchers. Within the first group, the use of open source software (R and Python) and the publication of code on platforms like GitHub is progressing. Yet, while more and more code is becoming available, it is often hardly understandable. More effort has to be done to decipher the increasingly complex statistical methods used by researchers with appropriate documentation (methodological appendices, codebooks) and literate programming. Researchers also have to think more about thoroughly about how to publish their data in a FAIR way.

Within the group interpretativist-qualitative researchers, legitimate concerns arise regarding sensible material. However, these fears are sometimes unwarranted as there are possibilities to publish data in a responsible way (e.g., through anonymization techniques). Researchers working qualitatively also face problems when their primary data is under copyright (text or images). Many scholars are often unaware of the tools at their disposal for the publication of qualitative data.

Finally, PhD candidates need more role models among senior professors. It is remarkable, for example, that when controversy erupted around the research of one professor at HU’s social sciences institute on the sensible issue of Islam and integration, replication material for his publication was not available.

I had sufficient support from mentors and Wikimedia for my activities.

C. Neue Kontakte mit der Community für Offene Wissenschaft

Haben sich neue Kontakte oder Austauschmöglichkeiten mit Vertreter*innen der Community für Offene Wissenschaft ergeben? Bitte beschreiben.

Since the beginning of my job at the WZB, I had the chance to meet and discuss with Alessandro Blasetti who is open access advisor. Alessandro coordinated OA 1000+, a major project that led to the digitalization and publication in open access of around 1500 texts authored by current or former WZB researchers. He provided very useful insights and resources for the Summer School Workshop.

D. Neue Kontakte mit Vertreter*innen der Wikimedia-Communitys

Welche Erfahrungen hast du im Rahmen deiner Arbeit mit den Wikimedia-Projekten und/oder dem Kontakt mit den Communitys in diesen Projekten gemacht? Welche Wikimedia-Projekte sind für deine Forschung und auch für deine Forschungsdisziplin ggf. relevant? Bitte beschreiben.

So far, I have not engaged with Wikimedia projects beyond the kick-off meeting and the workshop in Hannover. I am nonetheless interested in using Wikidata for future research.

With the development of webscraping techniques, Wikipedia is increasingly used as a source of primary data in political science. For example, interesting work has been conducted by Sascha Göbel and Simon Munzert on Wikipedia as a tool of political advertising. I had the chance to attend a seminar on automated data collection with Simon Munzert and was fascinated by the data that can be harvested from Wikipedia through webscraping. Wikidata’s API extends these possibilities even more.

See:

Göbel, Sascha and Simon Munzert. 2017. “Political Advertising on the Wikipedia Marketplace of Information.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 36, no. 2: 157-175.
Brown, Adam R. 2011. “Wikipedia as a Data Source for Political Scientists: Accuracy and Completeness of Coverage.” PS: Political Science and Politics, vol. 44, no. 2: 339-343.

E. Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten

Welche Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten (Formate etc.) kannst du dir nach Abschluss des Programms vorstellen, um mit den Fellows, Mentor*innen sowie Wikimedia Deutschland im Austausch zu bleiben? Bitte Beispiele benennen.

I would like to stay in contact with the fellows and mentors of the program together with the Wikimedia team. If any event (talk, seminar, workshop) is organized in Berlin, I would join. I am also interested in future training opportunities: I enjoyed the webinars and would join them again if new topics are covered.

The Freies Wissen community is growing each year and we could think of regrouping people around fields of expertise. These small groups could then advise new fellows on specific issues.

As mentioned before, we could also consider organizing a “Berlin Open Science Stammtisch.”

IV. Förderung von Offener Wissenschaft

A. Neue Initiativen zur Förderung Offener Wissenschaft

Sind im Rahmen des Fellow-Programms an deiner wissenschaftlichen Einrichtung (neue) Initiativen zu Offener Wissenschaft entstanden? Wenn ja, welche? Wenn nein, warum nicht? Bitte beschreiben..

The Freies Wissen Fellowship did not lead to new open science initiatives in my institutions, HU and the WZB (at least, not as a direct consequence of my project). I felt I needed to learn more about open science and apply it to my own research before launching new initiatives.

B. Initiativen zur Förderung Offener Wissenschaften

Welche Möglichkeiten siehst du, um (eigene) Initiativen zu Offener Wissenschaft an deiner wissenschaftlichen Einrichtung anzustoßen? Welche Herausforderungen und Chancen bestehen dort, um das Thema Offene Wissenschaft sichtbar/noch sichtbarer zu machen? Bitte beschreiben.

A priority should be to place open science at the core BA research design courses. HU’s Institute for Social Sciences already highlights the importance of reproducibility in its methodology classes, but a more holistic approach to open science would be needed. One difficulty is that mandatory classes have pre-determined formats that have been elaborated years ago. A revision would need discussion at a high level in the Institute.

The WZB has a tradition of organizing lecture series. I think it could be very interesting to have a lecture series on open science, divided along the different steps of the open science research cycle (discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach, and assessment). We just need a critical mass of interested researchers.

As I first noted in my Zwischenbericht, I have been thinking for a long time about the creation of “reproducibility clinics,” where researchers would try to reproduce the findings of a colleague’s working paper before it is submitted. This type of meeting, however, requires considerable time and implication from the participants.

C. Interesse an Offener Wissenschaft

Welche Möglichkeiten siehst du, um (eigene) Initiativen zu Offener Wissenschaft an deiner wissenschaftlichen Einrichtung anzustoßen? Welche Herausforderungen und Chancen bestehen dort, um das Thema Offene Wissenschaft sichtbar/noch sichtbarer zu machen? Bitte beschreiben.

The colleagues with whom I have discussed about the fellowship are usually excited by the new developments in the field of open science. Many are thinking of applying next year to the program. There is a high interest, in particular, for open access publishing and open reproducible research.

D. Anwendung von Prinzipien Offener Wissenschaft

Inwiefern war das Fellow-Programm nützlich für dich, um aktiv(er) Prinzipien Offener Wissenschaft in deiner Forschung anzuwenden? Welche persönlichen Erfolge konntest du erzielen oder auch nicht? Wie möchtest du daran langfristig anknüpfen? Bitte beschreiben.

Before the fellowship, my experience with open science was, I would say, “latent.” I was informed about open science, was curious to learn, and I had started experimenting with open science tools. Yet, the fellowship really worked as a catalyst. I started to connect the pieces of the puzzle: open communication, open data, open reproducible methods, open software. Most importantly, I changed my workflow. Before the fellowship, all my attention was focused on writing and publication. With the exception of a few conferences, my work was rarely discussed beyond the walls of the university. The fellowship pushed me to open up my research from the start and to split my work into interoperable pieces, which would be useful for a broader audience. I will continue improving this workflow in the future.

Dein persönliches Gesamtfazit

Welches persönliche Fazit würdest du zu deiner Teilnahme am Fellow-Programm und der Beschäftigung mit Offener Wissenschaft ziehen?

The fellowship has been a great experience. It changed my perspective on science. One the one hand, I am much more critical of traditional scientific practices. On the other hand, I see a lot of hope in the open science movement. There is enthusiasm, innovation, and dynamism in the work of the open science community. It’s refreshing and inspiring. I was privileged to get to meet people at the forefront of the movement. I have learned enormously and will continue to do so in the years to come. I highly recommend the program.