2025/11/06 by Jenni Adams · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Artistic and Creative Research #Data Analysis and Archiving #Publishing and Scholarly Communication
paper · doi:10.3998/jep.7845
openalex created_date 2025/11/06 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Open research has been widely promoted as a means of democratising knowledge, yet its uptake in the humanities has remained limited and frequently marked by ambivalence. In the context of growing institutional investment in open research, this article interrogates what openness entails for the humanities within a research setting increasingly shaped by neoliberal rationalities. While often framed as a democratising force, the implementation of open research policies, particularly around open access and open data, seems to have largely aligned with market-oriented imperatives, emphasising transparency, efficiency, and economic return. The article argues that the friction between open research and the humanities arises not from an aversion to openness per se, but from the instrumentalization of open research and its imposition as a universalising, science-centric framework that fails to accommodate the pluralistic dimensions of humanistic research. Rather than dismissing openness, the article calls for a reimagining of open research grounded in pluralism, situated ethics, and disciplinary specificity.