A Reflection on a Year of Open Scholarship

2023 was a year.

I entered the year partway through my tenure as SIPS president. I have always been ambivalent about being in leadership roles. I don’t particularly feel the need to be in charge, though like anyone, I do like being heard, and I like helping other people be heard. I think also sometimes groups like having me involved because I am an organizer at heart – I like to set systems up and get everyone on the same page so things can move forward. But I’ve never felt the desire, yearning, whatever, to be In Charge of Something. There’s no appeal. So I do find it kind of amusing that I ended up starting this year in a position I never really saw myself in.

We did announce early in the year that we’d be heading to Kenya for SIPS 2024, which I am beyond stoked about. I am eternally grateful to those who proposed it, those of us who supported the proposal, and for those who are organizing and will attend the conference in the coming year. I think it will be a good one. The rest of the year was thankfully pretty quiet, with us focusing on hosting the 2023 conference in Italy, fundraising for PsyArXiv (you should donate, if you can), and announcing a bunch of well-deserved awards. We also worked on improving our own internal organization, with a hope that this also improves our external communication and helping people find ways to get involved.

Quala Lab also had an amazing year. We jumped from like seven people at the beginning of the year to something like 20 people now on our “listserv.” We published quite a few papers, on rethinking transparency and rigor from a qualitative open science perspective, ethical considerations at the crossroads of open science and big qualitative data, and what journal reviewers at education journals can do to encourage open science practices. We also submitted our first registered report on open science practices in early childhood special education qualitative and mixed methods research and had it provisionally accepted. And I was on a guide for social science journal editors on easing into open science, which I believe is still currently under review. We had amazing luck when it came to reviewers. Just really thoughtful and critical comments which vastly improved the quality of what we’d written. We submitted a paper as a part of a special issue on open evaluation. We’re also writing an open access textbook on qualitative methods which integrates different perspectives about open scholarship, and I am pleased to say there are already several people who are patiently waiting to be able to use the book once it’s ready. Lastly, if I’m remembering everything anyway, we’re helping the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Teaching (FORRT) update their clusters to include more on qualitative open scholarship. (I’m also helping with their curated resources project.)

We also had the chance to do some really cool outreach. Quala Lab members were involved in a webinar for the Center for Open Science on qualitative data sharing. I was invited to talk to Princeton’s Human Diversity Lab about open qualitative research, and to give a plenary on introducing qualitative research into psychological research pedagogy at the Association for Psychological Science-Society for the Teaching of Psychology Teaching Institute. We were also invited to speak to the University of Southern Indiana for Open Access Week. And we presented at SIPS, which led to me seeing some Quala Lab members for the first time in like a year (though it felt like it had been much longer). (I was also able to see some family friends that we hadn’t been able to see since before the pandemic, which was wonderful.)

And then some other projects I’d been on for a while moved forward or wrapped up. Katie Corker and I helped facilitate a partnership between the Center for Open Science and FORRT, which was been super rewarding to see blossom. We released data from an international study of statistics and mathematics anxieties among university students, and I was happy to contribute to a commentary on how to improve internationalization in the psychological sciences.

And then came the job posting for the training and education manager at the Center for Open Science.

I was actually really happy at Dartmouth’s Center for Program Design and Evaluation. My (now former) colleagues are amazing, and the work being done there is impactful and personally meaningful to me (feel free to check out a recent publication I helped with on geriatric interprofessional team transformation in primary care; hopefully I’ll be able to help on a couple papers for other projects I was on). I love research and evaluation, and it was lovely being in a workplace where my efforts toward improving practices were largely well received.

So when three different people told me, “This job ad sounds like it was written for you,” I kind of shrugged it off. My response after reading the ad?

“Well, shit.”

I’m a bit surprised I applied, and even more surprised I got it. To the extent that there is a mainstream open science movement, I don’t really feel like I’m a part of it in a lot of ways. But open scholarship gets me up in the morning. When I get a request to review some chapters for a textbook on data management in large-scale education research, I get excited. (You should check out Crystal Lewis’s book, by the way. My first endorsement! And an exciting one.) I like thinking through problems of ethics, values, norms, pedagogy, and workflows. I like helping people find ways to make their work more transparent and rigorous, in line with their values. It’s fun and meaningful to me, and yes it’s sometimes incredibly frustrating, but it’s worth it in the end.

So I made the jump.

There are very few times where I’ve joined a new community and felt like I fit right away. (I have a lot of experience doing this, as an army brat.) I tend to be really enthusiastic about the spaces I join, and sometimes the number of ideas I have overwhelms or annoys people. I talk a lot about equity- and justice-related issues. I have high standards, both for myself and other people. And I speak my mind. I try to always be kind, and to take other people’s perspectives into account, but I know I can be a lot for some people as a result of these character traits. Joining a new environment can be pretty stressful, because I don’t want to alienate anyone. I want people to feel comfortable coming to me, providing me with feedback, and hearing feedback from me. At the same time, I can’t help but imagine how things can be, and to share those thoughts with others. I wasn’t sure how I would be taken in my new position, if people would like me, or if they’d regret hiring me after my first rant about qualitative open scholarship. (I’m… mostly kidding.)

All of that nervousness went away after the in person team retreat. I heard colleagues bringing up similar equity- and justice-related thoughts I had. Colleagues called for epistemic diversity, being mindful about metrics, and humility in our approach to improve research transparency and rigor. They asked questions when I talked about different approaches to open scholarship. They were interested in me and what I had to say. And when I came up with some ideas on how to revamp our training materials, they were on board and added additional insights and feedback that make me excited to get into my home office each morning. I underestimated how much having genuinely nice colleagues can make even annoying days a lot better. I’m glad I’m here, and I hope they’re glad, too.

Despite all the good news, this was also a strangely stressful year. There was a shooting at a business very close to where I live. A family member had cancer. Another family member got into a car wreck; he (thankfully!) was fine, but the car was not. I got COVID. Later, I got diagnosed with arthritis in my lower back. Changing jobs, while exciting, was also frustrating in some ways. During the switch, I lost coverage on a medication I was on (though it wasn’t doing anything for me anyway). One of Quala Lab’s papers is trapped in closed access for a year because we missed some fine text in the publishing agreement. I still want to move, though for good and bad reasons, it doesn’t look like we’ll be doing that anytime soon. Our family cat, Kitty, is nearing the end of her life. She just turned 19 years old, and we have had her 16 of those years.

I came to the realization that by some standards, I am entering mid-career.

This isn’t even getting into what (inter)national politics have looked like this year, or the changes that I’ve watched my former colleagues and academic friends have to deal with in their professional lives. We’re seeing changes in funding guidelines for researchers, shifting support for higher education, and social changes – some of which I like and many of which I don’t. Some days I feel really good about where my own life is going, and others I wake up wondering what else is going to go wrong. I think the prevailing feeling I’ve had over the last year is an increasing sense of agency over my own professional development, but a diminished sense of influence when it comes to everything else. Some days, it all feels too big.

I don’t think we can afford to act as if things are too big for us. Things are going to continue to change. It doesn’t ever really stop. I haven’t the slightest idea what 2024 will have in store for me, but I am grateful for 2023: the good, the bad, and the confusing. The best I can do – maybe the best any of us can do – is enter 2024 in good faith and with the willingness to stand by our beliefs, help those in need, and find allies and accomplices for what lies ahead.