Alignment of Top-Down Policies With Emerging Bottom-Up Practices: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”

In their article, Marsden and Morgan-Short comprehensively review the current state and development trajectories for key areas within open research practices, both in general as well as more particularly in the context of language sciences. As the article reveals, the scope of open research practices is enormous and essentially touches upon every aspect of performing and interacting with research. The authors touch upon the lack of an established metascience within language sciences that would help inform and guide development of research practices, but, as I see it, the problem is universal, and there would be benefit in creating a stronger and more cohesive metascience discipline in general. While researchers have established practices of research, education, and dedicated scholarly communication outlets within the philosophy of science, history of science, information science, and higher education policy, metascience has remained an area where the discussion is highly distributed and appears sporadically across diverse research disciplines. As Marsden and Morgan-Short's review demonstrates, there are a lot of open questions relating to how to move forward on a global scale in the best interest of research and researchers. A more cohesive core of metascience would aid in the creation of immediately useful knowledge.

One key perspective I would like to put forward to facilitate further structured reflection on the complex challenges surrounding open research practices in language sciences as well as in other disciplines is that of alignment seeking between top-down policies (e.g., mandates by funders or institutions for making publications or data open, institutional involvement in research infrastructures) and bottom-up practices (researchers taking particular practices into use by themselves, driven primarily by intrinsic motivation). Researchers in general have a lot of autonomy within their work, an aspect which creates a unique environment for the creation and wider adoption of new practices. The initial spark for many (I dare say most) open research practices and services for operating them have often been spawned as researcher-driven initiatives, for example, IRIS (Marsden & Mackey, 2014) and OASIS (Marsden et al., 2018) for research in language learning, without top-down requirement or enforcement. Today science policy, particularly within the European Union, is heavily influencing the uptake of open research practices by introducing requirements and monitoring for their compliance both through the open science requirements stated in the grant agreements of their own research funding instruments but also more generally for member countries to implement and report back on. However, if the requirements given top down are experienced as irrelevant and disconnected from the research context as seen by researchers, there is risk of alienation and a negative outcome for adoption (Lilja, 2020). Alignment of policy and practice in the context of open research practices is no easy challenge—balancing variables such as timing, sensitivity to the needs of individual research disciplines, research assessment, technological maturity, and practical feasibility runs the risk of friction in many regards.

Even though challenging, alignment is necessary to smoothly scale useful new practices beyond the pioneering early adopters who take them into use in a bottom-up way. While the democratization of research that the internet has enabled has been a strong positive force for spurring innovation in the space of open research practices, the distributed nature of the environment introduces new threats to the scholarly record. The risk of open research initiatives being held up by solely volunteer effort without robust organizational backing can be very destructive as it could mean that valuable scholarly resources vanish, as has been the case, for example, for hundreds of open access scholarly journals (Laakso et al., 2021). Once new practices gain momentum it would be wise for institutions and policymakers to meet the research community halfway, that is, to align and to facilitate the creation of robustness to otherwise vulnerable services. One should not require or mandate practices that do not yet exist or have demonstrated potential, but if those leading in the field wait too long or support the wrong action or actors, this can lead to loss of momentum or even worse. In the case of IRIS and OASIS, this concern has been exemplarily catered to through early involvement of institutional support from both research performing as well as research funding organizations.

What could then help aid alignment of policy and practice where circumstances are currently not yet so optimal for open research practices? Marsden and Morgan-Short highlighted that changes in research assessment have the potential to substantially alleviate some of the adoption challenges that open research practices have faced. This is a persistently recurring theme in panel discussions on open research practices in which I have been involved for over the last decade: Without change in assessment, researchers will never get anywhere regardless of what is built and recommended to be used. Change in research assessment was also singled out as the most substantial obstacle for change in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the final report of a recent expert group of which I was part (European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, 2019). Despite the buzz around the San Franscisco Declaration of Research Assessment, it is still common for institutions to lack integration of open research practices as part of research assessment (Ross-Hellauer et al., 2023). One issue has been the lack of taking tangible steps to fundamentally changing practices rather than just signaling support towards the greater cause of diversification in research assessment.

The recently launched Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (2022) seeks organizational signatories to commit to and follow up the development of their assessment practices. It remains to be seen what effect this substantial new initiative will have on the landscape, but it carries the potential to help with the alignment of policy and practice in a way that the Declaration of Research Assessment has not done beyond initiating a very important discussion and creating a general direction among stakeholders. Researchers as highly autonomous actors need to perceive tangible use and acknowledgement of investing their time and effort into open research practices, otherwise these practices run the risk of never reaching their full potential in improving the research system.