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

Notions of openness in research have largely been shaped by scientific principles of transparency, efficiency, and replicability, operationalized through standardized workflows, interoperable infrastructures, and measurable impact. Endorsed by funders and policy frameworks, this model often misfits humanities and social science epistemologies in which knowledge is interpretive, historically situated, and ethically entangled with context. This article critiques policy-led definitions of openness by tracing how open access and open science have been implemented through compliance regimes, metrics, and author-facing payment models, with uneven consequences across regions, languages, and institutions. Rather than rejecting open research, the article reinterprets it through a humanities lens. It develops a theory of interpretive openness through Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work and extends it through three historical case studies—the cento, scholastic glossing, and Derrida’s margins—which show how form-bound reuse, annotation, and participatory reading have long operated as infrastructures of public meaning-making. The article then connects these genealogies to contemporary digital publishing and editorial infrastructures, including preprints, open peer review, and web annotation, and argues for open research designs that value interpretive labor, visible process, and community accountable infrastructures.