A fundamental property of scientific research is that it is scrutinizable. And facilitating that scrutiny by eliminating barriers that delay or prevent access to research data and replication materials is the major goal for transparent research advocates. So when a paper that actually studies open research practices hides its data, it should raise eyebrows. A recent paper about openness and transparency in Human-Computer Interaction did exactly that.
The paper is titled “Changes in Research Ethics, Openness, and Transparency in Empirical Studies between CHI 2017 and CHI 2022“. It looked at various open practices of papers sampled from the ACM CHI proceedings in 2017 and 2022. Then it compared how practices like open data, open experiment materials, and open access changed between those years. Sounds like a substantial effort that’s potentially very useful to the field! But it doesn’t live up to the very standards it’s researching and advocating for.
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