Open Science and Open Education initiatives are manifold, but discussions raise issues on their real potential for research and education. Single institutions, the EU, research funding agencies and publishers have or are currently developing guidelines for Open Science and Open Education. This top-down approach is said to be successful and supporting for researchers and lecturers. However, these approaches do not consider daily practices and the environment of research and lecturers. The work of researchers and lecturers is likely to be influenced by diverse factors – form the personality of a person, to conditions of one’s working space, to characteristics of the research discipline, where a person positions oneself.
The study accompanies researchers and aims at analyzing their behavior and working practices to point out chances and challenges of open practices. The core question relates to benefits of open practices – described in guidelines of Open Science and Open Education – for researchers and lecturers, while considering discipline- and contextual-dependent aspects. Subject to analyses are factors and their relations, which influence research and teaching practices.
The pilot study focuses on early career researchers from educational research, i.e. persons, which work in higher education and are responsible for research and teaching, respectively. The study’s long-term goal is a scheme that shows influencing factors and their relations and may serve as basis to investigate and compare similar research in other disciplines.
The project collaboration partners are the Information Center for Education at DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and the Open Science Lab at TIB | Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library. DIPF coordinates the user study and data analyses. TIB supports the participants regarding open science practices and tools. The 18-month study starts at Dec 1 2018.