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update references in background
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zackbatist committed Feb 7, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ The open science movement comprises a series of practices and principles intende
The idea that scientists should generally contribute to a public domain of knowledge without profit motive has led to open science being heralded as revolutionary, community-oriented, and anti-capitalist means of production. However, while open science does have the _potential_ to effect radical change, this is not a given. The social and institutional contexts in which we do science is firmly embedded within capitalist and neoliberal power structures that reward individualistic competition and do little to actually encourage equitable and accessible research practices, and as such, make it difficult to fully embrace open science ideals [@mirowski2018]. Moreover, the open science movement, which is dominated by STEM disciplines, prioritizes a grossly simplified and asocial notion of what science is and entails. Namely, it considers science as the accumulation and assembly of a species-level understanding of the world, which is not held by any one individual but is stored in seemingly value-neutral and disembodied media, facts and observations. This is manifested by digital telecommunications systems that host files, document processes, facilitate co-working opportunities, and perform automated processes. However, these systems have become so emblematic of open science that the use of these tools and resources designed to _support_ open science is often mistaken for _actually doing_ open science.

Open science is typically compared with the open source movement in that they both involve a distributed, digitally-mediated and worldwide labour force, who somehow derive rough consensus directed towards assets held in the public domain [@tennant2020]. But they differ in terms of the contexts in which they operate, the stakeholders involved, and the kinds of outcomes they produce. Whereas open source emerged from concern of consumer rights and then developed as a means of maintaining resilient and collectively motivated projects, open science comes out of a desire to make research practices more transparent and accessible. Open source is performed by professional and hobbyist software developers alike, and participants contribute in a wide variety of ways (including: programming, writing documentation, translating software and documentation, bug reporting, and financial support), but, in open science, scientists are usually the only participants actively involved in creating and maintaining contributions.
Moreover, whereas open source projects often attract participants with varied stakes in the software and use cases in mind, open science projects are typically bounded by small communities of specialists with very particular needs. Additionally, open science is bounded by the professional contexts in which science operates, and as such, produces outputs that can be easily credited to specific sets of individuals for reasons of resume-building, tenure and promotion [@mirowski2018; @dorta-gonzalez2021]. Open science projects whose contributions are supported by research funding also face sustainability concerns, as participants lose motivation to contribute once funding runs out. Once a project is completed, papers have been published, and credit has been allocated, it is common for scientists to mark their projects as finished and move on to new endeavours [@kelty2008: 271-275]. Open source projects, on the other hand, are motivated by a more practical need for the software to function properly in perpetuity, and contributors may remain actively or sporadically involved to satisfy users' needs, or to direct users to derivative and functional forks of abandoned software [@kelty2008: 278-281; @coleman2012: 116-122; @hippel2003].
Moreover, whereas open source projects often attract participants with varied stakes in the software and use cases in mind, open science projects are typically bounded by small communities of specialists with very particular needs [@kling2003]. Additionally, open science is bounded by the professional contexts in which science operates, and as such, produces outputs that can be easily credited to specific sets of individuals for reasons of resume-building, tenure and promotion [@mirowski2018; @dorta-gonzalez2021]. Open science projects whose contributions are supported by research funding also face sustainability concerns, as participants lose motivation to contribute once funding runs out [@carver2022; @adema2021]. Once a project is completed, papers have been published, and credit has been allocated, it is common for scientists to mark their projects as finished and move on to new endeavours [@kelty2008: 271-275; @howison2013]. Open source projects, on the other hand, are motivated by a more practical need for the software to function properly in perpetuity, and contributors may remain actively or sporadically involved to satisfy users' needs, or to direct users to derivative and functional forks of abandoned software [@kelty2008: 278-281; @coleman2012: 116-122; @hippel2003].

The adoption of open source development models among archaeologists is generally informed by the broader open science movement, which is motivated by a genuine desire to facilitate novel research opportunities, to make participation in scientific research more equitable, to reclaim science as a public good, and to enhance the means of validating findings. However, the predominant concern with implementing best tools to use, adopting optimal data processing pipelines, and tying into global, web-based infrastructures, protocols and standards [cf. @kansa2014; @kintigh2015; @roosevelt2015] distract from fundamental tensions and contradictions regarding the actual value of working in the open. For instance, Faniel et al. [-@faniel2013 299-301], Atici et al. [-@atici2013 676-677], Huggett [-@huggett2018; -@huggett2022], @sobotkova2018, @opitz2021, @haciguzeller2021, and @batist2023a demonstrate that to make the reuse of archaeological data feasible and useful in a practical sense, it is necessary to re-introduce social friction that these infrastructures are designed to eliminate. In other words, the pressures and circumstances of being an archaeologist and doing archaeological research assert themselves when attempting to make practical use of these infrastructures, and therefore must be accounted for in their design and implementation. In this paper we aim to identify similar sources of dissonance with regards to the promise, potential, and actual implementation of open source software development models among archaeologists.

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