Scholarship should be open, inclusive and slow
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https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender?source=post_page-----15ab6ce1d74c-------------------------------->
Emily M. Bender
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There are two values in this debate that I think have broad, though perhaps not universal, agreement:
Scholarship should be open: The results of scientific and other scholarly work should be accessible to the broad public, and not locked up behind paywalls. This is important for both the goal of scholarship (often publicly funded) benefiting society and the goal of research communities becoming more diverse.
Scholarship should be inclusive: A diverse research community does better research because it benefits from more perspectives AND no one should be prevented from participating in the research they want to do because of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, etc. (We are a long way from achieving this goal.)
A third value I think is less widely held, but it is important to me and I hope many others:
Scholarship should be slow: We engage in science and other scholarship to learn about our world and to serve our communities. In the best cases, we develop and substantiate new ideas firmly rooted in what has gone before and our new ideas respond to and uplift human values.
If we are under constant pressure to churn papers out quickly — either to appease the bean counters’ publication metrics or to lay claim to being the first to have some idea (or even less meaningfully, to being the first to hit some high water mark on some leaderboard) — we don’t have time to:
* Thoroughly understand how our work connects to what has gone before;
* Explore the ethical implications of our work, including seeking input from impacted people and groups as necessary;
* Engage in research that crosses disciplinary boundaries, which requires building understanding across diverse vantage points;
* Perform thorough and careful evaluation (including error analysis);
* Provide and maintain infrastructure for genuine reproducibility.
(Fast scholarship also tends to be uninclusive, being accessible primarily to those who can drop everything in pursuit of deadlines and likely therefore don’t have caregiving responsibilities, community mutual aid commitments, disabilities or language barriers, and probably do have a wife at home to look after their needs.)
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https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/scholarship-should-be-open-inclusive-and-slow-15ab6ce1d74c
