Open Research vs Open Science
AMBIENT is an interdisciplinary project between the arts and humanities, psychology, and technology. The project builds on the artistic research carried out in the Sverm project and the scientific and artistic research in the MICRO project. As such, "open research" feels better and more inclusive than "open science".
Why Open Research?
The research world has undergone a "revolution" within the last few years. Nowadays, "everyone" talks about Open Research, yet there are many challenges when it comes to performing Open Research in daily life. AMBIENT aims at exploring openness as much as possible.
When asked why we work openly, we reply: "why is closed research better research"? We believe that working openly makes our research better. One of the main points of doing research is learning more and expanding our shared knowledge about the world, and this is not possible if we do not share openly.
Working openly is challenging. It takes more time to share data than to leave them on our closed server, and we need to document our code better when sharing it with everyone. Still, we believe that this also forces us to be better researchers. It allows others to look at what we have done and make corrections. Hopefully, others can also build on our material in various ways.
Open Applications
The first part of the openness is to share the AMBIENT research proposal. We have received a big chunk of public funding and think it is fair that people see what we wrote in the original grant. Most likely things will not go entirely as planned. That is how basic research works. The competencies of the team will impact what is done. Sometimes you stumble upon something that was not planned. Still, the proposal shows what we are aiming to do.
Sharing the application can also be helpful for others writing applications. The AMBIENT application is but one way of writing a successful research proposal. By sharing it, we hope to inspire others to write good proposals. In the long run, that will hopefully also result in better research.
Open Access
All publications coming out of AMBIENT will be available Open Access. Not everyone has access to subscription journals or can afford to pay for individual articles. That is why it is necessary to make publications freely and openly available, either directly from the publishers or through the institutional archive at UiO.
Open Data
The AMBIENT project will also aim to share data openly. That will be challenging from a privacy perspective, but we have some thoughts on how to anonymize data to make it possible. In any case, we are eager to follow the FAIR principles when archiving our data. Parts of the process is also to share our data management plan. This may be more details than some people need, but we have seen that many researchers are uncertain about what a data management plan should look like. Ours is not perfect, but it is an example that can hopefully be helpful to others.
Open Source
In addition to sharing data, we will also provide the code we develop in our GitHub repository. That way, anyone can verify our analyses, and it is also possible to build on our code for other use cases. The development will build on and contribute to the ongoing development of the Musical Gestures Toolbox.
Open Methods
Sharing our source code is also partly about sharing our methods. We will also continue to describe the way we work in various ways, including during the MusicLab events aimed at the general public. Explaining the way researchers work is critical for the legitimacy of research.
Open Educational Tools
In our experience, sharing publications, data, source code, and methods are also very useful for students. It helps students to understand the craft of doing research. Building on previous projects and leading up to the start of AMBIENT, we have spent a great deal of time and effort in developing the online course: Motion Capture: The Art of Studying Human Activity. That course helps train students that are interested in joining our research project.