Interviewer: Yeah, thanks so much for agreeing again that this interview and we've discussed it and you've signed the form of consent, but this interview is being recorded and I'll be using the video and audio file for the creation of a transcription. My student research assistant will be helping me in this task and I will also be using a local large language model. Is that okay with you?

Interviewee 23: Sure.

Interviewer: Brilliant. So this is a study about open science and open science practices in linguistics. And so my first question is simply, linguistics being such a broad field, where do you situate yourself and your research within linguistics?

Interviewee 23: So I, yeah, I really consider myself part of applied linguistics. And applied linguistics in the sense of applied to language learning, right? Even though it's not necessarily the only application. It seems to be what 99% of applied linguistics seems to be about. So I really like the approach of applied linguistics, SLA, second language acquisition, and language teaching. PROJECT as a small subset of language teaching if we need to be more specific. Some, yeah, and CALL, Computer Assisted Language Learning as well. But not necessarily. I mean, I really like to try to be a part of applied linguistics.

Interviewer: Nice. And we'll start with your personal associations. What do you associate with open science and with open science practices?

Interviewee 23: All right, so open data, open access, open code. I mean, I haven't checked anything, right, to prepare this interview. So, I'm most likely forgetting many things. Transparency and rigor. But in general, so, yeah. I'm not sure if there is one definition or anything in particular, but I appreciate the effort and the state of mind that all these practices, whether they're complete or partial or whatever, I appreciate the effort and the willingness to open everything and to be as transparent, as sharing, as collaborative as possible. Yeah. And in general, I mean, even people who do not necessarily talk about any of those practices, you see that in general, I think that most of, at least all part of academia, I'm not sure, but I would suppose most of academia in general seems to be built by people who are genuinely interested in sharing knowledge, practices, good ideas, good data, and they're willing to even if it's just someone sharing a PDF of their article when you ask them or things like that. I mean, I think that's the whole spirit, right? I think it's the same spirit behind all these practices. And I appreciate also the fact of trying to be more systematic in that.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: And particularly I think, yeah, open data is particularly important, I think. And open scripts, open code. So apart from the open access and the publishing aspect of things, that is also super, super important. But I mean, in terms of how science is transformed by the process of sharing, I think that open data and open code is really where the key is. You tell me if you need more or if you need less.

Interviewer: No, that's a great start. I'd actually like to go back to the way I introduced the topic. I said this is about open science, but linguistics being a humanity, there are some people in the humanities who feel that the term open science is not appropriate. And so some have suggested open research for humanities or others open scholarship, which is often thought to be a broader term to encompass open science slash research and open education as well. I was wondering whether you had any thoughts on this.

Interviewee 23: No, I haven't been part of those discussions. I mean, I suppose some parts of linguistics are closer to humanities and others are closer to psychology and applied linguistics is typically more influenced by psychology and educational sciences, where I don't think many people are questioning whether they pertain to science or if it's something else. So I haven't seen that in the part of the field where I'm mostly roaming. But I understand some people might not like it. I really don't have any problem with the term science here. Even though, of course, we're doing social sciences. It's not the same as other types of sciences. Now, if you also want to not only include science and also tackle all the issues of education, open education, OER, etc., That is super interesting as well. I think it also comes from the same kind of willingness to share that so many of us have. It's definitely the same spirit. I don't think it's the same purpose. For that reason, I do not see the need to put them together. I mean, they're super important, but it's not the same point, right? And so, especially, I mean, focusing now on OER and open access, probably that's very close, right? But if you really focus on open data and the possibility of being able to, for example, reanalyze data, or not sharing just what you decided to put in your table one of descriptive statistics, right? That is a core I really think it's a core necessity to do sound and rigorous and reproducible science, right? And so in that sense, I don't think it's the same, and I think it needs its own its own part or its own term.

Interviewer: I'll be using open science as a term, but I mean it in the broadest of sense to include all of these things. So feel free to use whichever term you prefer for linguistics. But now I'd like to talk about your own experiences. Do you take part in any open science practices yourself or have you in the past? And if so, which ones? Oh, I think you're frozen.

Interviewee 23: Sorry, I didn't get that.

Interviewer: Have you taken part in any Open Science practices yourself or in the past and which ones, if so?

Interviewee 23: Okay, so definitely less than what I'd like. That's the main point here. I consider myself as a person that's willing to put everything transparently and open and etc. And at the same time, I was quite disappointed by how much I've done it, I've actually done it. For example, when I published PROJECT in 2022, I said the data was going to be on OSF. I had created the repo and it took me one year to put the data there. So that's kind of terrible, but I mean, the intention was there. But what I mean is, yeah, I have more the intention and sometimes I don't have the, or I don't know, the necessary discipline to actually clean the script and clean the data files and put everything there. Because it's not just putting everything you have. It's also cleaning it for anonymization, making sure there's nothing you don't want. I mean, nothing that is not harmful for yourself, but for others, right? And that really made it more difficult than what I wanted. And so I've also not been published. I mean, I haven't published a lot of empirical studies yet. So this is still something quite new to me in general. But my intention is definitely to share data and scripts of everything I can for the papers I publish. Yeah. Do you want more details in terms of where?

Interviewer: Yeah, that would be interesting, actually. Which kind of repositories have you been using?

Interviewee 23: OK. For example, there are two places that I think about instinctively when we're talking about open science in applied linguistics. I'm not sure if the first is OSF or the first is IRIS, but definitely those two. I really like the initiative behind IRIS, the IRIS database. You know it, right?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: And I really like the initiative. I was very much frustrated by the way the website was organized and the fact that you had to fill this form every time you clicked on the download. And also the fact that you have a lot of index but no files. That's also first. I mean records but no no actual data or file. That was frustrating and and also the fact in general that yeah I found it not so intuitive and not so transparent, I mean. But, I mean, there were some great ideas in the way it was categorized. And also, I think they've improved. Like in the last six months, I've seen a significant improvement in usability of the website. Maybe more than six months, I'm not sure. So, I think it's going in the right direction. And, yeah, it's just that it's still I mean, there are some frustrating aspects of it, right? And the same thing for OSF, right? OSF is more intuitive in the way it works, especially for depositing files, but extremely, I mean, completely chaotic in the way it's organized, right? So I'm not sure how to find data on OSF. While on IRIS, I have still the hope to find things, and I do find some things, right? Not as much as I'd like but yeah. So there's definitely something frustrating about the way it's organized. For now I i suppose we could do better. But but it's I mean at least we we have some places to do it.

Interviewer: Yeah. And what about open access publishing? Is that something you've been involved in?

Interviewee 23: Yes, well, definitely. So everything I've written and I've tried to always put online as soon as possible. So I'm not sure what level of details you want this to get into. But since the beginning, I've tried to have my own web page to put all the PDFs of my publications. So especially, there are two things. I'm not sure if it's interesting for you, but let me know if it's not. There are two moments where I really learned. I mean, I had some revelations about what was going on in terms of open access publishing. And the first one, when I was a master's student, it was a long time ago, I was working. First, I was working in LANGUAGE at the time, almost only in LANGUAGE. And in LANGUAGE, most scholar, most academic publishing is still open access by default. Not really the case for everything, but definitely a lot of journals are open access. At that time, you couldn't find every single journal on the internet, but it was almost there. I mean, it was 2005, 2007. It was already possible to find a lot on the internet. But there were also already some international journals that I started to discover and I got into paywalls, right? Of course. And I was at the INSTITUTION and the COUNTRY INSTITUTION had no subscription to some of these journals. And my assumption as a, very inexperienced master students with absolutely practically, well, I think we had absolutely no systematic research course, research methods course, nothing. So the thing I assumed was, well, if something is behind the paywall, you don't need to read it or you can't. So that's kind of not relevant. And many years later, I realized that some of the most important papers were there and I had absolutely no way of accessing them. And so that was really, really frustrating to understand that, yeah, your understanding of science is blocked by the fact that you cannot access the most important or most influential works. And for example, when I did my PhD in INSTITUTION, a bit less than 10 years afterwards. And maybe also because it was later and dynamics had changed, but also because it was PROJECT and it was much more international, they had basically subscriptions for every international. And so I realized that, oh, here they do have access to everything. Before I couldn't. But the second thing is at the same time, I was also a professor in COUNTRY and, and of course, there you had access to nothing or almost nothing. It was frustrating. One year, we had an access to Scopus, just to Scopus, not to the journals that are indexed to Scopus. You could have Scopus, but not the journals. But also, that was one year. And then the year after, there was no Scopus anymore. And that's where, really, I said, no, everything I publish, I want everyone to be able to access it. And so, I mean, I was always convinced that everything we should do was to, I mean, we should definitely publish everything or release everything publicly, even if it means not respecting embargoes. I also don't really accept that. Until now, I have never published in something that required me to have an embargo on my website, so I'm fine. And what else? Yeah, so essentially I try to publish everything on my own website. It's easy because I can create my own website and it's not a lot of work and it's easy to release PDFs there. I know that it's not possible for everyone to do that. And I'm not convinced. I mean, I like ResearchGate. I mean, they've done a decent thing. It's problematic on some aspects. I don't like Academia. I think it's problematic. I do like Sci-Hub and even library genesis and things like that. Especially when I was in COUNTRY, I mean, that's not open access. That's pirate access, right? But for someone who was active in COUNTRY where it was simply impossible for to have access to not even to the old papers and the library, because, I mean, not the paper book side, the library. There was nothing, essentially, right? Not even in the country. I think you couldn't find most of the books in English about applied linguistics. You couldn't find them in the country. Maybe, I mean, at the individual houses, maybe, but not in public libraries or university libraries. And so for me, it was simply essential to be able to access those books and those journals like that. And for my students to have access to it, especially. I couldn't possibly imagine to let my students buy some, I mean, pay $40 for a paper that was maybe helpful for them. And while, I mean, basically that was one week of work in COUNTRY. So not possible.

Interviewer: Yeah. And when you publish papers or books or, you know, whatever you publish, is it a criteria for you that it's open access or that there is no embargo?

Interviewee 23: Yeah, it's super important. Yeah. Yeah, that's the huge dilemma, right? I haven't read those papers published one year ago. I think it was about the whole journal. Have you seen about the diamond open access discussion in which journal? Is it a Dutch journal?

Interviewer: No, I haven't seen it.

Interviewee 23: Oh, it's great. I mean, let me check. My memory is always as bad, but let me check if I can. Yeah. They did a lot of titles about diamonds. So, Doing the Right Thing to Get Diamonds by Emma Marsden. That's the Dutch Journal of Applied Linguistics, volume 13 in 2024. So, it's a whole issue of the journal that was edited by Andringa, by Sible Andringa. So, it's a, he's a researcher in applied linguistics. So it's the yeah the Dutch journal of applied linguistics.

Interviewer: Yeah if you've got a link there maybe yeah of course in the chat because I really haven't heard about this.

Interviewee 23: Oh that's it's great it's a fantastic. Oh that's no sorry wrong link. Do not pay attention.

Interviewer: Yeah Zoom is sometimes weird.

Interviewee 23: Maybe you know it's just my, my my copy didn't work. Just my paste didn't work. So that's that.

Interviewer: Okay cool I'll look into that thank you.

Interviewee 23: And yeah, so it's Andringa and let me check the, I think I can get you the reference, the full reference. This is it. And so yeah, diamond is a scientist's best friend.

Interviewer: Nice.

Interviewee 23: You will like the title.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: And so it's, that's the first article, but there were many other articles in that issue by Emma Marsden, by Meng Liu, and also by Luke Plonsky, and also about the conflicts of trying to publish in open access journals versus trying to get published in the most influential journals. And especially as an early career researcher, how it backs your perspective, etc. And so there were a lot of responses to that article. That's really nice. There was even a kind of seminar webinar series about it. So you might be able to find some things. I haven't been able to read everything, though, but I think at least they raised a lot of very good issues and very good discussion that is often not explicit enough. And so thanks also for your initiatives to make it more explicit. But it's great that more and more people are trying to discuss it openly. That's great. So going back to your question, so definitely I'm, my personal preference would be to always publish in fully diamond open access journals. One great thing in CALL is that one of the four main journals in CALL is a diamond open access journal. It's language learning and technology by the University of Hawaii. It's a great journal, very good quality. Maybe actually one of the maybe the best of the four or five journals in CALL. I mean, top journals in CALL. And it just has some strong limitations. No DOI and very long I mean, they have almost a DOI, but not really. And no and a very long publishing timeline. At least they had when I PROJECT. So, I mean, my article was accepted in YEAR and published in YEAR, two years later. When they said, yeah, it's accepted, so it's going to be published in June YEAR, I said, well, sorry, do you mean YEAR? No, two years later. So apart from the time you already have for reviews, you had two more years. But I think they improved that. They had the backlog of publishing something like that. But so that's a great thing about CALL is that there you actually have the opportunity to publish in a very highly ranked or rated open access journal, diamond open access journal. And that's great. But I also don't want to publish only in that journal, right? You do want to publish a bit everywhere. So it's a question for the future. And I haven't seen that very clearly in fully applied linguistics journals. So I'm not sure where to publish in applied linguistics that is as good and as rigorous and also open as Diamond Open Access. The good thing is I do think that most of the journals now at least in Applied Linguistics, I think most of the journals do not have an embargo for personal websites, personal repositories. At least that's what I'm hoping for. I try to avoid Elsevier entirely. I'm not sure if I will always be able to do that. So yeah, that's where I'm at right now.

Interviewer: Thank you. Thanks for sharing. We've kind of already touched upon a lot of these, well, some of these things, but because you are involved in some open science practices, right, and have been in the past and have an interest, my question would be, where did you learn about these practices? Who or what encouraged you to go down that route?

Interviewee 23: Mostly Twitter, I would say, I think. Twitter and I mean, so, okay, actually, before I started doing research, before, even when I was a bachelor student, for, I'm not sure when or why, probably because I was some kind of geek, I started to get involved in some in some open source software questions, even though I'm not a programmer and nothing, but I, I was, I mean, I was in the, what was the first thing? I don't remember, but I started to, to edit on, to, to, to edit Wikipedia, not first year, but the YEAR. And that's really when I learned about open license, for example, you know, open source licensing for content and for software. That's where I really learned about license issues. I didn't really connect that to journals, but I mean, that's probably where I learned about those practices at first, I suppose.

Interviewer: And otherwise? So your motivation is, are you self-motivated or have you had any, you know, have you been obliged for instance at any stage to publish your data or your code?

Interviewee 23: No no no it was, it's fully my own motivation there I mean and it's not because my supervisors did not want it or or but they, they were not aware of that. So yeah right I think yeah it's probably because of my involvement in open source software and in wikipedia and things like that that I learned about that. Uh it's it's you know the kind of early internet internet spirit. Yes of yeah we're going to change the world, before we realized polarization and social networks issues but yeah. But yeah, no, essentially my supervisors were not very aware of that. But they weren't against it either. I mean, yeah, there is one issue. It's about my PhD thesis. So personally, I would have put my PhD thesis in PDF online immediately. One of my supervisors told me he preferred that I would put it on an institutional repo with a two-year embargo because I still had to publish some of the articles in it as journal articles. But even for, I mean, if he hadn't insisted, even for that reason, which I agree with, I want to publish that as an article. But even then, I would have still released it publicly because I think that you could still say, yeah, it's in my PhD thesis, but it's not actually published. Yeah. Professionally, so I think it's okay to submit it to a journal and also for any risk of plagiarism or things like that there you actually have the public proof that I wrote this before so I don't think there's a risk. I mean there might be a risk but there's, it's not an issue, it's not a problem, I think. It's not a problem to publish something like that. But still, I followed his more than a bit more than an advice. I mean, I was not forced to. I did. I was OK to follow that.

Interviewer: Yeah, interesting.

Interviewee 23: And I still share my PhD thesis with anyone who wants who asks for it individually.

Interviewer: Yeah, it's a perfect move to the next question, which is, as you were talking about supervisors for the PhD, and we now want to move away from your personal experiences and try and think about the linguistics community more broadly. So as far as you can tell, of course, based on your own experiences, how widespread are open science practices in linguistics today?

Interviewee 23: Very good question. And I don't know. That requires a systematic survey. Are you doing that as well?

Interviewer: Yeah, I'm working on some parts of that. It's a big project, so only a little bit to start with.

Interviewee 23: That's a super interesting question, really. Because to have really systematic data, especially if you can kind of have a sample that is not self-selected by people who are interested in it that would be super interesting to know also have a like what's the attitude overall? Because I mean that that that's why this Dutch journal of applied linguistics initiative I really like appreciated it because it comes from very senior researchers like Andringa. He's he just he's not an early career researcher who has everything to prove or he's willing. I mean he's no longer a kind of naive person like me who wants to change the world or something. But still, that he is openly I mean, yeah, discussing it and saying we should do more, that's great. I was missing people like that, I think. But I really could not tell you how systematic the practices are. I really believe that 99% of people have the same spirit of sharing, but they don't have necessarily the same, I mean, there are definitely people who are afraid of hypothesized risks of, oh, sharing might harm you in some way or they might steal your data. I mean, I don't know. There are some people who are concerned, seriously concerned by that. And maybe I'm also utterly naive there, so probably. But I do think that everyone has the same spirit. I mean, I was always, especially my students in COUNTRY, I was always telling them, you know, if you write to any author and ask them for the PDF of their article, they will gladly share it with you. And they were so amazed by that. They were saying, really? Wow. Can I do that? And that was, I mean, one great story about, ihat is once one of my students in COUNTRY writing their BA thesis wrote to one of the authors, and that was during COVID, and they wrote to to one of during the pandemic. And they they they wrote one of the authors of the the article. Not only the person said oh yeah here is my pdf but also oh and what's your thesis about? And let me tell me more about it. And they ended up having a meeting on Zoom and that was such an amazing opportunity for someone in in CITY completely disconnected from the research world otherwise And that was fantastic. So I really think that, yeah, if someone does not share their PDF with you, it's not that they won't want to, it's just that they're overwhelmed with emails maybe. So I think the practices, I mean, the intentions are there. It's just that the practices are not systematized. And I have no idea where we stand in terms of how generalizable these practices are. I suppose there is some generational differences here as well, but I'm not sure. It's really, I mean, depends on also the habits developed in every institution. It's still something very much in progress there.

Interviewer: For sure.

Interviewee 23: That's what I can tell you.

Interviewer: Yeah. You've already mentioned some of the factors that mean that some people are reluctant to share or don't. Maybe they're not reluctant, but they simply don't do it. And so fear of people maybe stealing their data or their work or what's the other one you mentioned? Fear of being, being wrong?

Interviewee 23: Yeah, mostly that, right?

Interviewer: Yeah, so that would be one factor. Can you think of any others that might sort of lead to this, yeah, such reluctance?

Interviewee 23: I mean, explicit reluctance, I'm not sure. I would say most of it is not being aware that you could do that or not being aware of how to do that.

Interviewer: Okay.

Interviewee 23: Like I suppose IRIS and OSF and even, I mean, they're not very well known yet still, I think. I think so.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: And also even there, yeah, because there is also this technical barrier, especially in our field, many people are not comfortable with that kind of stuff.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: I mean, I suppose also that there is also some people who, not with any strong problem there, but are reluctant of people realize, I mean, are afraid people, they might have made some mistakes and that people might discover those mistakes or might have gone a bit too fast over the data or I don't know have HARKed a bit too much or anything right. And I don't think, I mean I think most people have probably, yes, I think we've probably all made mistakes and I think it was I think 99% of those mistakes were in good faith. And so we should just assume that and that people will recognize that. And I really hope that if I made a mistake in one of my data, one of my analysis and someone re-analyzes the data and says, oh, actually you should correct, I would be happy to correct it. I'm not sure if the system, the publishing system is fully allowing it, I mean, as easily as it should be allowed. Or seen as as not something that is an indication of a problematic behavior but rather something it's basically or collective ability to improve by working together in collaboration.

Interviewer: Yeah, so true. I just have one more question to do with open science and linguistics, which is open science as a movement, if we can call it a movement, has not really come from linguistics first, but probably came from other disciplines. And the question would be, do these open science practices need to be adapted in some way for linguistics? Are there any specificities of linguistics that need to be taken into consideration?

Interviewee 23: Good question. I'm not sure. I don't think so. I mean, especially there's not a single, linguistics is too broad and complex and very too really, I mean, there's more things in common probably between applied linguistics and psychology and education sciences than there are between applied linguistics and very different types of linguistics, right? I think. So, well, that's also why IRIS is such a great initiative because of the fact that it's specific to applied linguistics. That's what allows it to have actually a categorization and a typology of variables. And that is absolutely great. That is so much better than what you find on OSF. We should probably be doing even more, right? I mean, there's, I always find it that we could I mean, some fields, learner corpora, probably, for example, or corpora in general, we could do more to put everything in the same kind of formats. Well, there are efforts to systematize metadata. Yeah. There's still much more to be done also in terms of, I mean, for example, collecting data from tests in a systematic way and in a comparable way with the same kind of, I don't know, vocabulary tests or grammatically judgment tests and just collecting it in a systematic way and then putting it in a way we can all analyze larger data sets would be awesome.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Interviewee 23: I'm not sure if it's, I mean, that's maybe much beyond what we call open science right now. That's more like collaborative science, large initiatives. But I think that's the way we should, one of the ways we should go, sorry.

Interviewer: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that was the last official question. Is there anything else you want to say about open science and linguistics?

Interviewee 23: No, I think that's great. Just thanks a lot for showing the way.

Interviewer: No, I'm just asking questions.

Interviewee 23: I mean, with the ReproducibiliTea yeah.

Interviewer: I mean, oh, it's true you've attended some sessions, right?

Interviewee 23: Some yeah less than I would have liked but it's

Interviewer: Actually, that's one of the questions I asked people who have attended but I forgot. What was their motivation like what drew you in?

Interviewee 23: I mean so mostly because I wanted to learn new. I felt like I could improve my practices and I'm not aware of everything. And I wanted to learn new tools, new techniques, new processes. I mean yeah, in general, there were really good insights and recommendations. I would have liked to attend more.

Interviewer: You're welcome anytime. We have a great summer program.

Interviewee 23: It's really great that you're doing this publicly. That's so great. So please continue doing that, even if you have the impression that not so many people from outside your institution come.

Interviewer: There's always a few.

Interviewee 23: There are, right? And it's, I mean even if you have five people who managed to come, there might be 20 behind that wanted to come as well. That didn't make it or something.

Interviewer: Or people who hear from other people.

Interviewee 23: Thanks a lot for doing that.

Interviewer: No, thank you. I'll stop the recording now.
