Open Science especially recent endeavours to archive and share research data on a large scale provoked a discussion of how research, as a search for knowledge – if not: truth – deals with data as an offset of this knowledge. The Symposium reflects on practices of sharing and reusing data and asks, first, exactly what knowledge it generates and, second, where this knowledge comes from in the process of scientific work.

The first contribution discusses Open Science as a collection of related practices concerning access to data and resources as well as results and knowledge, methodologies and participatory research practices (Reichmann, 2017). This complexity evokes an epistemic discussion of the concept of open knowledge (Rubin 2021) and its implications for education and educational science against the background of a new practice of science through Open Science and its involvement in certainty and uncertainty as an epistemic question of research culture(s).

The second contribution takes on a position of quantitative methods and methodology and discusses replication crisis versus opportunities of Open Research practices for quantitative analysis. While a re-use of data opens up great and economical opportunities for the generation of reliable knowledge (Krammer & Svencik, 2021), a light is shed on methodological and scientific-theoretical challenges in the re-use of data, like comparability and consistency of the constructs recorded. At the example of pracitices like HARKing (hypothesizing after the results are known; Kerr, 1998) possible threats to both value and validity of statistical hypothesis tests and thus of scientific findings are discussed.

The third contribution takes the position for qualitative research and shows how formal data sharing standards of for instance findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usabilty like the European commission framework FAIR in Horizon Europe (European Commission, n.d.) meet challenges concerning the distribution of the way, data was collected (Jesser, 2011) as well as processed and what role participants played in making sense of it. Data sharing will therefore be regarded in the light of standards for qualitative research (Strübing et al., 2018), opening the discussion for considering the whole process of knowledge construction in Open Science practices.

In the fourth contribution Open Research practice in educational science is discussed against the background of data archiving, sharing, and re-use. Quantitative and qualitative data more and more has to meet requirements of scientific funders and journals (Logan, Hart, & Schatschneider, 2021). Data curators are introduced as players in the Open Research community supporting researchers in overcoming the discussed challenges of sharing data and in meeting Open Science standards.

European Commission. (n.d.). Open science. Retrieved 22 January 2024, from https://rea.ec.europa.eu/open-science_en Fecher, B.; Friesike, S. (2014). Open Science: One Term, Five Schools of Thought. In Opening Science by Sönke Bartling and Sascha Friesike. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_2. Jesser, A. C. (2011). Archiving Qualitative Data: Infrastructure, Acquisition, Documentation, Distribution. Experiences from WISDOM, the Austrian Data Archive. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.3.1734 Kerr, N.L. (1998). HARKing: hypothesizing after the results are known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 196–217. Krammer, G. & Svecnik, E. (2021). Open Science als Beitrag zur Qualität in der Bildungsforschung. Zeitschrift für Bildungsforschung, 10(3), 263-278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s35834-020-00286-z Logan, J. A. R., Hart, S. A., & Schatschneider, C. (2021). Data Sharing in Education Science. AERA Open, 7, 23328584211006475. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211006475 Reichmann, W. (2017). open Science between social structures and epistemic cultures. A Conceptual Complement from a Science Studies Perspective. TATuP, https://doi.org/10.14512/tatup.26.1-2.43 Rubin, M. (2023). Opening up open science to epistemic pluralism: Comment on Bazzoli (2022) and some additional thoughts.Critical Metascience.https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/dgzxa Strübing, J., Hirschauer, S., Ayaß, R., Krähnke, U., & Scheffer, T. (2018). Gütekriterien qualitativer Sozialforschung. Ein Diskussionsanstoß. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 47(2), 83–100. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-2018-1006