Infrastructuring Open Science

In the last two decades, research data became to be recognized as an independent product in its own right and incrementally became more visible among policy makers, funding agencies and various academic stakeholders. In fact, driven by the Open Science agenda which aims “at making scientific research and data accessible to all”, Open Research Data has become an important and desirable outcome of publicly funded research. This is proven by the increasing attention and specific funding schemes worldwide targeting the establishment of Research Data Management (RDM) policies and Research Data Infrastructures, to be developed according to the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-use) data principles. This dissertation takes these institutional and infrastructural developments as a point of departure and presents a long-term ethnographic account of the socio-technical challenges involved in translating the Open Science grand vision and related Research Data Management policies into practices. Since 2016, I have participated and carried out research in an information infrastructure project (INF) connected to a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) composed by 14 interdisciplinary projects and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The DFG expects all its funded projects, from all disciplines and research fields, to follow RDM policies and guidelines. Therefore, the aim of the INF project is to support the development of RDM practices, infrastructural solutions, and concepts which all together should lead to the curation, long-term preservation, sharing, and potential reuse of research data in our CRC. The focus of my study targeted specifically interdisciplinary research projects
who apply mainly qualitative and ethnographic methods as data collection, being the majority in our context. For these types of methodological approaches, mainly applied by Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) disciplines, the requirements for data management are relatively new, and only few technological aids and infrastructures have been developed thus far to specifically support the management of these sensitive and personal data characterized by additional epistemological, methodological and ethical challenges.
With my research, I went beyond the institutionalisation of research infrastructure and rather investigated scientific research practices ‘on the ground’. By following an infrastructuring approach in synergies with previous work, my research proposes a shift from designing systems as fixed artefacts, to designing them as ongoing infrastructures, as a way of building sociotechnical processes able to relate different contexts (institutional and practical) and create new (social-technical) relationships ‘from within’. At the centre of our infrastructuring work, I locate a socio-technical platform called ‘Research-hub’, established to customize, test, and study new RDM concepts and workflows expected to be implemented by INF in the long-term.
Research-hub represents the socio-technical anchor point of the infrastructuring work
undertaken but also stands as an example of a small scale and local research data infrastructure ‘in the making’.
The thesis outlines a vision to achieve RDM practices and workflows with a specific attention to curation and sharing practices in the CRC’s, an interdisciplinary and ethnography-driven research context, and reports on how we started to promote a bottom-up collaborative sharing culture essential to putting into practice the Open Science agenda and the practical implementation of RDM policies. For this purpose, a design concept, called Data Story, has been designed and iteratively evaluated through what I call 'embedded evaluation’ meaning that evaluation opportunities spontaneously emerged from my double role and my ongoing engagement in the field. In fact, since 2016 I have been members of the CRC myself, so I was part of the context I was called to design for (and with). Therefore, the thesis presents ‘embedded evaluation’ a methodological approach that can be fruitful to the CSCW and HCI communities, specifically for those projects engaged in infrastructuring, where the researcher carries multiple roles in the field (member of the community, researcher, designer) and where it is not possible to draw demarcations between investigative, design and evaluative work. Conceptually, I contribute to the expansion of the term ‘articulation work’ by illustrating how designing for RDM implies to support the work for future cooperation not yet known.