Between People and Paper: Inhabiting Experiment in a Journal Club

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration reported in the journal Science that a disturbingly large proportion of psychological studies cannot be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). The ensuing ‘reproducibility crisis’ became a lightning rod for contesting what counts as legitimate research, and for negotiating the relationship between communication infrastructures and research practice. In the psychological and cognitive sciences, the Open Science community has advocated widespread reforms to incentivize transparency, encourage replication, and detect and discourage questionable research practices. The model of ‘openness’ underlying mainstream Open Science centers on sharing information to increase science’s self-correcting capacity. Against the backdrop of broad-scale transformations in Open Science, this case study depicts how scientists read. By examining the activity of a group of researchers ‘virtually witnessing’ an experiment together, this study reveals reading as a non-trivial process that matters for how research is apprehended and for how science is moved through time and space. The case complicates a disembodied, information-centric ‘openness’ pursued by mainstream Open Science reforms and advocates integrating situated and embodied resources into methods reforms, beginning with practices of reading.