Interviewer: Yeah, I think that's working, which is good. Yeah, thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this interview. We've already, well, you've already given me the form of consent, but as a reminder, this interview is being recorded. And the question would be whether you agree to it being recorded and also to it being transcribed by myself and my student research assistants with the help of a local large language model for research purposes.

Interviewee 02: Sure.

Interviewer: Great. In that case, let's get started. So as I wrote, the aim of this study is to find out more about open science practices in linguistics. And so the first question is, do you see yourself as a linguist or primarily as a linguist? And if so, which sub disciplines of linguistics do you see your work?

Interviewee 02: Yes, I definitely see myself as a linguist. And I've been a linguist for sort of most of my life, I could say, but scientifically speaking, I'm in PROJECT linguistics, that is mainly PROJECT discourse studies.

Interviewer: Great. And yeah, we'll start with your personal beliefs. And so the first question would be, what do you associate with open science? And what are open science practices to you personally?

Interviewee 02: Well, open science is, of course, more than just publications and publishing data. It's also The idea that science should be transparent and aim at being reproducible to as large an extent as possible. I mean, you can't, nobody will be able to interview me in 100 years time, but they could do an interview with similar people. And it's also a democratic question, question of democracy, not only to pay back for the ones of us who work at tax-funded universities, but also to help anyone in the world to be able to take, well, read and analyze the data we produced. Sharing our tax-funded employments or similar.

Interviewer: Oh, yeah, that's really interesting. And linguistics is, I don't know actually what it's like in the countries where you've been working, but I think in English-speaking countries, linguistics is traditionally seen as a humanity as opposed to a science. And so some people prefer to use open research as a term rather than open science for linguistics because it's a humanity and not a science. And then there are other people who prefer the use of the term open scholarship, but often because that includes open science slash open research and open education. So it's like a broader term. And yeah, I was wondering, like, whether you've put some thought into this, how you feel about the use of the term open science for linguistics or even for your subdisciplines of linguistics. I'm going to put the terms in a chat just as a reminder because it's a lot of them.

Interviewee 02: Yeah. I hadn't thought of it and I actually hadn't heard anybody talking about mentioning it, but that might also be because I've been working in a COUNTRY area area for many years. I mean, of course, I talk and write to people in English, but I had not come across that issue, which could, of course, be an issue. It's not as clear in the languages I normally work with, except English, because we normally say like the hard sciences. So it's still science. I mean, linguistics is still a science, but it's not a hard science. But I could understand the issue. I mean, I don't mind calling it open research or something like that. Open scholarship sounds a bit too individualistic, but I haven't put any thought into this really. That was just my immediate response to it. But, yeah. No, I've mostly been discussing the difference between open access and open science. So, yeah. I could understand the issue, especially in English. I think we already use the equivalent of research more often when. No no I think it's not. Yeah I'd have to look into that.

Interviewer: Actually I mean it's interesting.

Interviewee 02: Yeah it's time. So because we have two terms in LANGUAGE as well.

Interviewer: Yeah yeah it's interesting because I think uh this problem if it's a problem or this you know terminology um debates might be very english based. You know um but still it's interesting. I mean um. I will continue to say open science but I mean also open research and I certainly also uh mean uh not just um open science, but also aspects of open education. So I use the term open science very broadly, and feel free to use whichever term you prefer in the rest of the interview. But now I'd like to talk about your own personal experiences. Do you take part in any open science practices? And if so, which one and which ones and why?

Interviewee 02: I try to publish as open access as possible and partly because it's sometimes mandatory and partly because I want to try to be open I'm trying to create open data management plans and also put my data in repositories. I must admit I don't always do it as they are created, but more often afterwards. I mainly focus on the publication parts currently, which has been sometimes very easy and sometimes incredibly difficult. I recently published a short monograph, like 70 pages book. And since the library, I mean, many Many university libraries pay for open access of articles. I have, for example, an article from 2019, which is open access, thanks to my library. So I guess that is all good and well, at least for the ones that subscribe to that specific journal. But on the other hand, when I wanted to have this book open access, I had to apply to, I don't know, like 10 different funders before getting funding to actually pay for open access because this was at a well-renowned, well-established publishing house. And it wasn't even, I didn't even get the funding from one donor or sponsor, whatever you want to call it. I had to get money from three different places.

Interviewer: Wow. Yeah. But congratulations. Really hard work. I gave up for my monograph. I just said, yeah,

Interviewee 02: It's like, wow. And especially since, especially since in COUNTRY where I'm working, many of the larger funding, external funding bodies have in the past, maximum five years uh started to demand that you publish open access. If you get money from them you have to publish open access. Um I didn't. I then didn't have money from any of them so it wasn't compulsory. It was simply my own choice to try to make it open access mainly because um since I'm writing this book is about, um, PROJECT and I wanted, um, you know, for students there as well to be able to read it. Yeah. Um, and, uh, anywhere else in the, in the, uh, on earth for that matter. Um, yeah. So that's my biggest, uh, contribution to the, uh, open science um practices. I think I might come to think of something else later.

Interviewer: Yeah sure and um where did you learn about these practices? Um I mean where did you first hear about them or who encouraged you or taught you these or no one?

Interviewee 02: Very good question. Um I presume it must have been through the university library. First, when I realized that I could get some articles and others I couldn't, or I would have to order them and they would come to me in paper format because of copyright issues, etc., And then with this 2019 article that I got published open access through the library, of course that was, I had to, you know, cross somewhere and check a box somewhere and discuss things about that. And also because I made my doctoral thesis was a compilation thesis and I had a chapter in there which wasn't originally open access. It was part of a book that was not open access. So I had to apply for what they call the green open access to put the chapter a couple of years after its publication, I was allowed to put it in the university repository together to form a part of my thesis. But then I've also taken a doctoral, I took a doctoral course as well because they offered it just like in the few months, some of the few last months when I still was a doctoral student, I took this university course and like, I think it was called like Open Science for doctoral students or something. They talked about the FAIR principles and the difference between open access and open science. But they didn't mention that, you know, science research, even though it was in English. I'm thinking I should maybe.

Interviewer: Was it specific to linguistic students? Or was it open to?

Interviewee 02: This was fora anyone at the university I think because it was the library that held it. So it was cross-faculty.

Interviewer: Yeah interesting yeah Yeah, I think we're already thinking about what is on offer. But now I'd like to move away from your experiences and your conceptualization of open science and try to think about the broader field of linguistics. So your colleagues, as far as you can tell, how widespread are open science practices in linguistics and specifically in your sub-disciplines?

Interviewee 02: It varies quite a lot. I mean, I've been talking to some social scientists and it sometimes seems that different, especially different forms of computational linguistics or digital humanities are more often open access than at least some social science subjects. That at least when we discuss where to publish our work, there are a few options that are sometimes even completely open access from start to end. But I'm I don't think it's quite as common as soon as you sort of get outside the computational linguistics in a broader sense or digital humanities aspects. If you, I don't know, write about grammar or etymology or stuff like that. I'm not quite sure how common it actually is. At the same time, it's been debated quite a lot, and especially at my university, CITY University, they recently decided to drop parts of the ranking system. Because, well one of the reasons was simply that many open access journals are not in that top that currently, or before this decision, has given us most money. And that was one of the reasons for them to do so. They still have demands. You can't just publish exactly anywhere, but at least it's much more open.

Interviewer: That's really interesting. So it seems you're talking about open access publishing?

Interviewee 02: Yes, that's definitely it. Publishing data is more or less the same thing. Within corpus linguistics, it's quite normal to try to publish your corpus somewhere. Whether it's hosted at one of the larger national corpora, I mean, Sweden has one, Czech Republic has one, or if you just get a website either at the university or outside and publish it there. So, yeah, it's slowly getting more open, I would say.

Interviewer: Sorry, which factors do you think contribute to this currently fairly low uptake from what you're describing? And what can be done to raise awareness and raise the percentage of uptake of open science practices in linguistics and maybe specifically in discourse analysis or corpus based discourse analysis?

Interviewee 02: Well, one thing that definitely has made a difference, even though people are debating whether it's a good or bad one, is that the external funders demand it. But they also accept that the university pays for open access, for example. They don't mention anything about how to proceed if you are planning to write a book. If so, then you have to apply for money yourself, whether from them or from yet another external funder. So they just demand it, but they don't. Well, some of them have extra money set aside. Actually, I just realized. Yeah. At least one of them have specifically like this amount of money you will get whether you like it or not, because you will have to pay for this is for open access. But that's just one as far as I know from know. How many are there, five, ten-ish, small and large.


Interviewee 02: And then I guess it would help if you could, I mean, after a while, when other people have actually used previously published material, previously published data, and then you say that, you know, I have been working with this. This was open access. These data were available, so I've been working with them. Because that's not very normal still. I mean, for my thesis, I also made use of a lot of open access data from completely different sources. I mean, that was also social science sources, et cetera, and economic variables from the World Bank. Yeah. Like that so um but I i could do it because they were open um. So I guess talking about that and mentioning it and and not not just writing about it but actually mentioning it um at all kinds of networking events I mean conferences whatnot um. And then I guess I mean such a thing as the library. Organizing this um doctoral course was also um a good thing because it's it's I mean when starting out I knew quite a lot already but there were several people that didn't have any idea sort of where to look or how to use it or what it actually meant. Um and I guess especially with um What we see now in certain parts of the world, we have seen similar stuff in other parts of the world previously, but publishing it openly makes it also possible for other people to keep the data and to preserve the data for future reference. I'm working on a project right now, which is where some of the data are already published, fully open access and no copyright whatsoever. And we do have in mind that we might be doing a good deed here in case the country where that data comes from suddenly decides that no, no, no, we shouldn't publish those kinds of things anymore. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Wow.

Interviewer: And when you're thinking about like the kinds of offers that like the library offered in your case, and other such offers to raise awareness of open science practices, do you think there are any specificities of linguistics that ought to be taken into consideration?

Interviewee 02: Not quite sure what you mean by I mean of course it's a different thing to have um um the works of Shakespeare uh open access fully available and to have I don't know um um genetic data from a certain group of people in a certain part of the world. Yeah open access um of course um. So I guess it's it's easier in many ways. It's easier um as long as you're doing like um especially written working with written data um. And I guess, I mean, anonymizing, at least making sort of oral corpora, so text corpora from speech if you want, and then anonymizing them is, I guess, also something that can easily be made available openly. But was it something along those lines you were thinking?

Interviewer: Yeah. And I think you sort of already touched upon the fact that one specificity of linguistics and many humanities, to be fair, is that we do still tend to publish books and that the funders or just the system is not necessarily geared up to that. Yeah. So in a way, you'd already partially touched upon that. So, yeah, it's really interesting.

Interviewer: Yeah. And my next question is, it's very personal feeling, but I often have the feeling that within the open science community or people who are interested in open science, we talk a lot, we organize things, but sometimes I have the feeling that we're preaching to the choir. Do you know what I mean? Like we're kind of talking to people who already agree with us. And I was wondering whether you had any ideas as to how within linguistics we could spread the word better and go beyond, you know, the choir.

Interviewee 02: I guess it's, like I said previously, to actually mention it more often in a more general setting. Say that you go to, there will be a COUNTRY conference for teachers of COUNTRY languages in all the COUNTRY countries in a few months. That's quite. I mean it's still very specific but it's still a very general audience. People are coming from from well maybe not all five well maybe all five COUNTRY countries and they will be uh um literature teaches and linguistics and even, you know, history and geography, social science people. To then mention like, yes, this is a presentation that either is already published open access or that I plan to publish open access here. My data are here. You can go there and a link to in the presentation. I guess those things might help.

Interviewer: So kind of like modeling basically or

Interviewee 02: Yeah And simply getting it's just Yeah, normalizing it's

Interviewer: Yeah, that's a really, really good term. And apart from funding for publishing books and open access, as you've already mentioned, is there anything that would anything else that would help you personally do more open science or more open education for that matter?

Interviewee 02: Well, I mean, it's mainly if universities all over could decide to use one single sort of open source community to collaborate. Because right now we're using, you know, some people use Google Docs and some others use Microsoft Teams and they're the whole office thingy there. And then others use NextCloud, but it doesn't always work as well with those people that are not used to using next cloud. So um so yeah having better. But that's I mean that's hard for me to accomplish but that would definitely if you know university consortia could go together and actually work together on this not to not to uh only use closed collaboration spaces such as Google or Microsoft, it would be extremely helpful. Because then you could easily collaborate on stuff and then have like, okay, these pages are our private for the project and then we have these parallel pages where we put up stuff for anyone to see sort of.

Interviewer: Yeah, that ought to be doable in the 21st century.

Interviewee 02: I think so.

Interviewer: That's a really good suggestion. I really like it. Yeah, we've kind of reached the end. But is there anything else that you might want to add on the topic of open science in linguistics or, in fact, the humanities more broadly?

Interviewee 02: Well, no. My returning issue is open access books.

Interviewer: Yeah. I think that's an important aspect of our discipline or the humanities more broadly that's not yet been fully considered. Yeah, that's really interesting. Thank you so much.

Interviewee 02: Thank you.
