# README
Elen Le Foll
2025-11-17

# General information

1.  Title of Dataset: Semi-structured interviews with linguists about
    Open Science

2.  DOI:
    [10.5281/zenodo.17588655](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17588655)

3.  Contact Information:

    - Name: Elen Le Foll
    - Institution: Department of Romance Studies, University of Cologne
    - Email: elefoll@uni-koeln.de
    - ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-8010>

4.  Date of data collection: See metadata field Date of Collection.

5.  Geographic location: See metadata section Geographic Coverage.

6.  Description of dataset: This dataset contains the anonymised
    transcripts of 26 semi-structured interviews conducted with
    linguistics students and researchers between late February and early
    April 2025. The interviews were conducted by Elen Le Foll via Zoom
    and last around half-an-hour (range: 13–52 min). All were conducted
    in English except one (A01 in German). They were first transcribed
    using a local installation of Whisper (Radford et al. 2022). The
    automatic transcriptions were subsequently manually checked,
    corrected, and anonymised by two student research assistants, Vishar
    Kavehamoli and Julia Weinberger, and Elen Le Foll. The coding was
    performed by Elen Le Foll using OpenQDA (Belli et al. 2025). The
    repository features a CSV file that contains all the coded passages
    and their corresponding categories, as exported from OpenQDA. Note
    that passages may be listed several times, if they were assigned
    several codes.

# Sharing/access information

(See metadata record for dataset.)

1.  Licenses/restrictions: CC-BY-SA 4.0
2.  Links to publications that cite or use the data: See metadata field
    Related Works.
3.  Links/relationships to related data sets: See metadata field Related
    Datasets.
4.  Data sources: See metadata field Data Sources.
5.  Recommended citation: See citation generated by repository.

# Data and file overview

The dataset consists of two folders containing the following files:

- Documentation:
  - `00_README.md` (markdown file)  
    This file (= the current document) contains the documentation of the
    dataset.

  - `00_Interview_Structure.odt` (OpenDocument Text)  
    This file contains the pre-formulated questions that guided the
    interviews in both English and German.

  - `00_Consent_Form.odt` (OpenDocument Text)  
    The form of consent that all participants (digitally) signed and
    returned as a PDF.
- Data:
  - Each anonymised interview transcript is contained in a single
    plain-text file, encoded in Unicode UTF-8. Both the questions and
    answers are transcribed with one line per speaker turn. There are 26
    files in total. They are numbered chronologically, `A01.txt` was the
    first interview conducted.
  - `OS_Interviews_Coded_Passages_OpenQDA_12_11_2025.csv` (CSV)  
    This file contains all the coded passages and their corresponding
    categories, as exported from OpenQDA. Note that passages may be
    listed several times, if they were assigned several codes.

# Data collection

A first call to participate in an interview about Open Science in
linguistics was sent via the mailing list of [ReproducibiliTea in the
HumaniTeas](https://ub.uni-koeln.de/en/courses-consultations/reproducibilitea-in-the-humaniteas)
on 24 February 2025. However, only four linguists volunteered as a
result of this call. I subsequently sent personalised e-mails to a
further 27 linguists of different career statutes and from a broad range
of subdisciplines with the aim of interviewing some 20 linguists in
total. The positive response rate to these personalised e-mails was
higher than expected and quickly led to the recruitment of 22 additional
interviewees.

I drafted interview questions in both English and German. However, the
interviews were only semi-structured; the exact wording, order and
number of questions varied depending on the interviewees’ responses. I
conducted all 26 interviews online over Zoom from February to April
2025. The interviewees consented to the interviews being recorded and to
the anonymised transcription being published on an open repository. Most
interviews lasted around half-an-hour (range: 13–52 min). All were
conducted in English except one (A01 in German).

# Data processing

The interviews were first transcribed with the help of a locally-run
instance of the speech-to-text large language model Whisper (Radford et
al. 2022). These automatic transcriptions were subsequently checked,
corrected, and anonymised by two student research assistants and myself.
No attempt was made to transcribe pauses, false starts, or
paralinguistic sounds. Moreover, no attempt was made to systematise the
use of punctuation. The punctuation in these transcripts merely serves
to improve their readability.

To protect the identity of the interviewees, mentions of all concrete
projects were anonymised as PROJECT. Other aspects that were anonymised
include mentions of specific institutions (INSTITUTION), cities (CITY),
countries/regions/languages (COUNTRY), and colleagues and supervisors
(PERSON). To protect the anonymity of the interviewees, personal
metadata is not linked to any transcript. The following section only
provides summary statistics.

# Metadata

## Gender

| Gender |  n  |
|:------:|:---:|
|   F    | 15  |
|   M    | 11  |

## Country

| Country |  n  |
|:-------:|:---:|
| Belgium |  1  |
| Germany | 21  |
| Norway  |  1  |
| Sweden  |  1  |
|   UK    |  2  |

## Affiliation

Of the interviewees with a German affiliation, eight are affiliated with
the University of Cologne. Nine other German institutions are
represented. Three of the interviewees are currently affiliated with
European institutions but come from or have spent many years teaching in
countries of the so-called Global South.

## Academic status

|       Position        |  n  |
|:---------------------:|:---:|
|  Associate professor  |  5  |
|     B.A. student      |  1  |
|  Doctoral researcher  |  3  |
|    Full professor     |  3  |
|       Lecturer        |  2  |
|       Librarian       |  1  |
|     M.A. student      |  2  |
| No longer in academia |  2  |
|       Post-doc        |  7  |

The two interviewees who are no longer in academia had completed a PhD
in linguistics very recently and had decided to pursue a job outside of
academia.

## Tenure status

|        Tenured        |  n  |
|:---------------------:|:---:|
|          No           | 11  |
| No longer in academia |  2  |
|        Student        |  3  |
|          TT           |  1  |
|          Yes          |  9  |

TT = tenure-track

## Subdisciplines

At the beginning of the interviews, the interviewees were asked in which
subdiscipline(s) of linguistics they situate themselves and their
research. Almost all mentioned several subdisciplines, some of which
were anonymised either because they were highly specialised or because
the combination of the subdisciplines mentioned made it potentially
possible to identify the interviewees. Across all 26 interviewees, the
following subdisciplines were mentioned (ordered by frequency of
mentions): corpus linguistics (11), phonetics (7), applied linguistics
(5), sociolinguistics (5), discourse analysis (4), language teaching
(4), phonology (4), second language acquisition (4), language learning
(3), psycholinguistics (3), theoretical linguistics (3), English
linguistics (2), World Englishes (2), cognitive linguistics (2),
computational linguistics (2), language documentation (2), pragmatics
(2), teacher training (2), typology (2), variational linguistics (2),
German linguistics (1), Romance linguistics (1), Slavic linguistics (1),
classics (1), cognitive semantics (1), constrastive linguistics (1),
corpus phonetics (1), dialectology (1), experimental linguistics (1),
generative linguistics (1), heritage language research (1), language
testing (1), learner corpus research (1), lexicogrammar (1), linguistic
landscaping (1), morphology (1), multilingualism (1), neurolinguistics
(1), semantics (1), sociophonetics (1), speech science (1), syntax (1),
translation studies (1), variationist linguistics (1).

## Anonymised mentions of individuals

Many interviewees mentioned specific individuals who acted as role
models or who otherwise inspired them to find out more about OS. All of
these mentions have been anonymised as PERSON in the transcripts because
some interviewees also mentioned them being colleagues or otherwise
specified their relationship in such a way that may have led to their
identification.

The following individuals were specifically commended (some by multiple
interviewees), for one or more specific reasons. They are listed here in
alphabetical order.

| Name | Reason(s) for mention(s) |
|:--:|:--:|
| Benedikt Szmrecsanyi | Pre-registration, sharing data |
| Bodo Winter | Sharing data and code, promotion of OS in linguistics |
| Brian McWinney | CHILDES |
| Clare Patterson | Pre-registration, registered report |
| Elen Le Foll | OERs, ReproducibiliTea in the HumaniTeas, OS workshops and talks |
| Emma Marsden | Promotion of OS in applied linguistics |
| Jan Blommert | Tilburg Working Papers in Linguistics |
| Jordan Zlatev | Phenomenological triangulation |
| Lukas Sönning | Promotion of OS in linguistics, OS workshops and talks |
| Luke Plonsky | Promotion of OS in applied linguistics |
| Martin Hilpert | YouTube videos of online teaching materials |
| Martin Schweinberger | OER, online talks |
| Martine Grice | Promotion of diamond open access publishing in linguistics |
| Meng Liu | Promotion of OS in applied linguistics |
| Monica Bednarek | Sharing of annotation scheme |
| Naomi Truan | Talk “Open Science and me” |
| Petra Schumacher | Pre-registration, open data and code, mentoring of PhD students on OS matters |
| Sigrid Norris | Researcher stance/objectivity |
| Silbe Andringa | Promotion of diamond open access publishing in linguistics |
| Stefan Müller | Language Science Press |
| Timo Röttger | Pre-registration paper, registered reports, sharing data and code, supervision of metascientific theses |
| University of Lancaster | MOOC on corpus linguistics |

# References

Belli, Alessandro, Jan Küster, Florian Hohmann, Philip Sinner, Gino
Krüger, Karsten Wolf, and Andreas Hepp. 2025. *OpenQDA*. Zenodo.
<https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15024779>.

Radford, Alec, Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Greg Brockman, Christine McLeavey,
and Ilya Sutskever. 2022. “Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale
Weak Supervision.” <https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2212.04356>.

