Marcel LaFlamme, Public Library of Science; Fernán Federici, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Open research advocates increasingly position methods sharing as a generalized expectation: whether by depositing code in a GitHub repository or posting the step-by-step protocol of a laboratory technique, scientists are asked to make their procedures of data collection and analysis available in exhaustive detail so that others can inspect, replicate, and extend them. Yet current discussions around open research in Latin America have emphasized the need to consider the particular conditions of knowledge production and circulation in the region, rather than uncritically recycling problems and solutions from the global North. How, this panel asks, are research methods shared within and beyond scientific communities across Latin America? By what means are they shared, from lo-fi traditions of documentation and exchange to digital infrastructures that support distributed collaboration? To what ends are they shared, from the vision of transparency and reproducibility championed by scientific reformers to the democratization of knowledge and the forging of new social relations? Finally, what role might institutions like scientific publishers play in helping researchers to share their methods in locally relevant ways? We invite papers from STS scholars in and of Latin America, as well as metascience researchers and open science practitioners who may not locate themselves within STS, so as to convene a richly plural methodography of practices on the ground.
