What Does Openness Mean for the Humanities? Redefining Ethical and Reflexive Practices in Open Research

Open research, as currently defined by scientific norms, prioritises transparency, efficiency, and replicability. While suitable for STEM disciplines, these values often misalign with the interpretive, process-oriented, and culturally embedded methods of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). This paper critiques such models for marginalising alternative epistemologies and reinforcing narrow definitions of access, authorship, and scholarly value. While the idea that HSS scholarship is dialogic, collaborative, and interpretively open is well established, this study contributes a historically grounded intervention by examining specific case studies that are rarely considered within open research discourse. To develop this argument, the paper offers a historically informed, comparative analysis of case studies that model alternative modes of openness: the ancient cento tradition, medieval glossing practices in Peter Lombard’s The Sentences, and the contemporary digital project Derrida’s Margins. These examples illustrate how openness in the humanities has long operated through practices of reuse, interpretive layering, and co-authorship. The study demonstrates that openness in HSS involves critically engaging with inherited texts and traditions through interpretive textual analysis, rather than simply making them accessible or reusable. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s theory of the open work in his 1989 The Open Book, the study reframes openness as an ongoing, pluralistic process in contrast to a fixed output, and calls for open research frameworks that recognise methodological diversity and ethical complexity. As it traces historical continuities across ancient, medieval, and digital forms, the study reveals how HSS has long enacted openness through practices that resist closure, singular authorship, and instrumental metrics. Thus, rather than opposing scientific openness, this study calls for open research frameworks that accommodate interpretive plurality, ethical collaboration, and disciplinary specificity.