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The future
Published in Michael A. Lewis, Operations Management, 2019
Open science is multi-faceted and includes elements – such as data sharing to improve reproducibility – that can seem both obvious and also be very difficult to implement, especially in a discipline like OM that often works with for-profit organizations seeking commercial confidentiality? We have already discussed how important and yet difficult encouraging replication studies is but this is also a key part of open scholarship. Other aspects seem more straightforward, such as explicitly justifying statistical significance thresholds to allow for more trustworthy interpretations of research findings, but still require collective community action (e.g., all journal editors?). One powerful approach, yet to surface in OM, is the pre-registering of studies and analytical approaches so as to better distinguish between confirmatory and exploratory research. The purpose and benefits of open science also need to be very clear. Some argue that increased confidence in scholarship could reduce the science-practice gap but others, and personal experience, suggest this is unlikely to be a panacea for what is in many ways a very different question. Banks et al. (2018) summarize a range of more pragmatic benefits for scholarship, that have profound resonance with the challenges of OM. Open science can promote collaboration. The sharing of data (and digital object identifiers allow researchers to be assigned appropriate credit) facilitate greater communication between researchers with similar interests. It can also support meta-analytic reviews that are potentially more useful and effective. The separation and sharing of design protocols, measures and analytic scripts should also help to improve the rigour of research designs as well as reproducibility and replication rates and, as data sets, these shared resources can be cited to give researchers credit for their intellectual contributions. Ultimately although significant questions remain, especially in a discipline like OM that often works with for-profit organizations seeking commercial confidentiality, it seems highly likely that the challenge of open science will do as much to shape the future ‘state of the art’ in OM as any theoretical ambitions or empirical techniques or specific process, control, people, strategy or technology questions that arise in practice.
An unfinished journey? Reflections on a decade of responsible research and innovation
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2021
Richard Owen, René von Schomberg, Phil Macnaghten
But can we straightforwardly expect Open Science to be the next phase for RRI? While both seek to open up research and innovation systems, they may have rather different motivations, goals and envisaged means of reaching these (Shelley-Egan, Gjefsen, and Nydal 2020). Open science can be seen firstly as a means of improving scientific efficiency and reliability, and secondly, as a means to foster data sharing and collaboration across disciplines and knowledge actors, harnessing the power of digitalisation in order to catalyse research aimed at addressing societal challenges (see Burgelman et al. 2019, for a recent overview). Certainly, Moedas’ Open Science ambitions aim to include citizens from the outset (European Commission 2015). But questions remain concerning how the inclusion of citizens and publics in Open Science will be configured in practice. However, in fairness, these are questions that have also been levelled at RRI from the outset, and public engagement with science and technology more generally (Sykes and Macnaghten 2013; van Oudheusden 2014). Our sense overall is that by opening up research and innovation systems, Open Science has the potential to also open up discussions on the outcomes, entanglements and envisaged impacts of research and innovation processes, that is, in line with an emphasis on anticipation, deliberation and reflexivity as advocated by proponents of responsible innovation and RRI. We view in this sense Open Science as being an important step towards responsive research and innovation, which is, in turn, a necessary step towards responsible research and innovation (von Schomberg 2019).