When the open research movement emerged in the early 2000s, it did so under the presumption that wider availability of information was a universal public good. Today, openly available research can be harvested, processed and repurposed on a scale that was difficult to imagine even a decade ago. Despite this, access to outputs remains unequal due to factors such as cost and language, while issues around consent and privacy raise questions about how data is shared and with whom.
Drawing from lessons in decolonisation, archival ethics and studies in power and knowledge production, here’s how individual researchers, library professionals and institutions can build ethics into open research.
Ask if openness is appropriate instead of just possible
A key tenant of open research is that “openness” extends as far as possible. So, researchers need to decide where that boundary lies, particularly when materials include sensitive archives and historical documents.
I worked with colonial surveillance archives, such as files of the Department of Criminal Intelligence in British India, for several years, and I frequently came across intimate, personal letters, diary entries, notes and scrapbooks. This kind of material has been used for research and analysis. However, the nature of the archive raises the question: is it appropriate to make private material in a colonial surveillance archive fully open?
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Several colonial archives were created to gather intelligence data about anti-colonial activists, almost certainly without their consent. If this material is made open, are we not replicating colonial structures originally designed for control? If a private letter never reached its destination but was instead intercepted and stored in an intelligence archive, is it ethical to now make it open to the public?
Similar questions may be considered when working with interview transcripts, whether historical or contemporary. Researchers should be mindful that the interviewee may be speaking in confidence, when the interaction reflects trust between the interviewer and themselves.
Use methods of anonymisation, withdrawal and redaction
When material is sensitive, researchers should think about how it might be shared ethically. I have used methods of anonymisation, withdrawal, visually blurring out lines and even redaction in order to make such research data open. This seemingly contradictory method of openness is useful when working with a historical archive. If the subjects of the archive are dead, how do we obtain consent to make their data open in line with open research principles?
Open research principles demand that openness in research finds a balance. Writing methods of withdrawal, redaction or anonymisation into the research process where necessary will help to ensure the work complies with the ethics of openness.
Consider also:
- Are there other ways of sharing research and knowledge without exposing what was meant to be private?
- Could a community be harmed by the release of the research data?
- Does the dataset contain information that was gathered in confidence or without consent?
- Who will benefit from the data being open?
Make knowledge open and accessible for communities from which it originates
Much of global research is published in English, the dominant language of scholarly communication. As a result, research may technically be open access, while remaining inaccessible to many people whose experiences, histories and knowledge made the research possible in the first place. While knowledge is often extracted from marginalised communities through a translator or interpreter, academic outputs are published for academic audiences with institutional access to the published outcomes.
To combat this, researchers can ensure that every part of the research process is communicated to communities in language(s) that they can read and understand. Ensure you use a translator or an interpreter for the research output if you had one for data collection.
If the communities from which your research data originates are an oral-based in their communication, produce your research outputs in multilingual and multimodal formats. Cite and credit community knowledge, conversations or learning in non-traditional formats such as informal discussions, learning or community art.
If you are an open research professional, support translated summaries and plain-language reports, public engagement activities, exhibitions or community-facing outputs alongside traditional academic publications. Doing so shifts open research away from a one-way model of dissemination and towards a more ethical and reciprocal model of knowledge sharing.
Embed critical thinking into open research practices
While open research is presented as a democratising force, access to large funds is still disproportionately limited to wealthy institutions predominantly in the Global North. Hence, participation in open research remains uneven. The first step in rebalancing this would be to acknowledge that while researchers based in well-funded institutions can meet large costs such as article and book processing charges, researchers in low- and middle-income countries may not be able to do so.
I have recently started a critical open research reading circle in my workplace. We discuss issues of equity, consent, ethics, decolonisation, repatriation and epistemic injustices. What this adds to discussions around open research is a much-needed analysis of a basic question: open for whom?
If you are an open research professional, create spaces for researchers to engage critically with these issues. Reading groups, workshops, learning from critical disciplines and training sessions can help move open research conversations beyond compliance and towards reflection.
Rather than focusing merely on repositories, licenses and publishing requirements, encourage both researchers and senior leadership at your institution to consider issues such as:
- whose knowledge is being cited and amplified
- costs associated with open access, and who has the resources to meet them
- who benefits from research outputs and materials being made open (and closed)
- perspectives, communities or knowledge systems that have been overlooked.
Lecturers or educators can also consider embedding these questions into teaching practice. When teaching or discussing research methods, publishing or source criticisms, create spaces for the next generation of researchers to think about where knowledge comes from, whose voices are represented and how knowledge circulates within power structures. Open research skills are not merely technical or compliance-based, they are deeply critical and ethical.
As an open research professional, I have found that some of the most productive conversations happen when researchers are given space to discuss uncertainty. Open research policies can tell us what should be made open, but critical discussions help us think about how and why openness should occur.
Meghmala Bhattacharya is an open research culture engagement officer at Teesside University, UK.
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