Committed to equity and diversifying the research ecosystem.
What is Open Science?
Open Science: “The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.”
The Open Science movement is a global movement with calls from myriad national, international, and cross-border agencies. Recently linked with community-engaged and participatory methodologies, the goals of Open Science extend beyond access - sharing data and products. Open Science seeks to develop research infrastructure and engagement that fundamentally transforms the research enterprise designed to serve the common good with broad and diverse participation, which is known to make science better.
The four pillars of Open Science include open knowledge, open research infrastructure, open engagement, and open dialogue. Learn more about Open Science in UNESCO’s Declaration on Open Science.
STEMEd+ Commons is dedicated to FAIR and CARE Principles.
What does FAIR look like for STEM education research spanning many disciplines and discourses?
FAIR principles focus on improving the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of digital assets. Findable research is discoverable by academic and public communities, made accessible through clear protocols and a structured system of data identifiers and metadata. Interoperable research engages standardized methods for encoding and exchanging. Research should be reusable so others can use research outputs. These principles are most often applied to quantitative data sets although should be considered in the context of qualitative data.
What is CARE in STEM education research?
STEM education research should be of Collective Benefit to both researchers and research participants; for example, research data should be used to close the loop and provide benefit back to participants and classrooms. Participants can engage in data oversight with Authority to control how their data are collected, used, and shared; this might look like a student advisory board serving as a community IRB. Researchers are Responsible for ensuring evidence of collective benefit is available; that is, researchers should always answer “How do participants benefit from this research?”. Finally, data need to be Ethically collected, used, disseminated, and analyzed – and these ethics should be determined by both researchers and participants.
What does it look like to ethically share Open Science in STEM education research?
Education research can have many goals – it is exploratory, evaluative, observational, critical, participatory, community engaged. Regardless of the goal, education research ultimately considers human subjects. We advocate for CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) principles to ensure knowledge is developed and shared with respect for community-based data governance. Indigenous scholars developed and advanced CARE principles to address concerns with how data taken from Indigenous nations were being used in ways that did not reflect Native values or provide for Native benefit. We can learn from Indigenous leaders and revolutionize education research by translating CARE for the STEM classroom and beyond.