Open Science for Arts, Design and Music/Guidelines/Researcher

Why Open science is important for researchers

Knowledge is very rarely, if ever, produced in isolation. In reality, building on each others’ resources is an absolute precondition of research. We routinely build our analysis on text corpora created by others, interlink heterogeneous collections of digital or analogue information objects to establish hidden connections between them, enrich digital collections or use scholarly databases in our discovery practices. As Gregory Crane concludes in his seminal writing from 2015, it is the future and the future well-being of our scholarship is at stake if we choose to keep putting our work in expensive and closed paper-based volumes instead of making the underlying resources available digitally.

Sharing widely, and more than just final publications, from your research processes has been proven to have lots of positive effects. Apart from complying with your institutional or funder's policy, it can bring new collaborations and recognition of more and more in-depth aspects of your research. On the other hand, enabling such building blocks and working with sharing in mind from the beginning of the project comes with changes in project design and documentation.

On the other hand, working with sharing in mind from the beginning of the project comes with changes in project design and documentation. This document aims to guide you though all what it involves.

What

The researcher creates and reuses during their career/project a lot of copyrighted material.

The researcher as author of content

In most cases the researcher is the right holder of the works created, especially for research results. But not always.

• Rights of the institution. Check the contract, where it may be written that copyrights of works created by employees during their functions for the institution are transferred to the employer/educational institution, who then becomes the right holder (usually for software).
• Joint authors: a team of researchers may be joint authors of works created together, each giving their personal contribution to the work. When copyrights are not transferred, joint authors must all agree on what to do with the work, where to publish it and under what license.
• When copyrights have been transferred to third parties (e.g. the employer / the institution / the publisher / ect.), the author cannot publish and share the work without the right holder's permission, except for the exceptions foreseen by law (private use, ect.).

The researcher as user of content

This can be the case when:

• the researcher works on data protected by copyright made by somebody else
• the researcher integrates material protected by copyright made by somebody else in their works: are the conditions for the right of quotation fulfilled?