Open With Care! Consent, Context, and Co-production in Open Qualitative Research

Calls for qualitative research to adopt open science practices are growing louder, often framed as universally desirable reforms. Yet, such calls too often ignore the epistemic, ethical, and relational distinctiveness of qualitative inquiry, making ‘openness’ a site of epistemic and political struggle. In this article, I articulate concerns about the uncritical adoption of open science principles, particularly data sharing mandates, within qualitative research. I contend that, when imposed as default, opening qualitative inquiry risks enacting harm through three key pathways: the commodification of qualitative data (including via AI tools), the decontextualization and objectification of narratives, and the erosion of participant trust and consent. These risks are not speculative. In fact, they are foreseeable outcomes of applying quantitative logics to qualitative contexts without due reflexivity (which, I contend, represents a kind of epistemic colonialism). In this paper, I position qualitative openness not as a neutral or technical good, but as a contested terrain in which power, epistemology, and institutional politics are negotiated. Against the backdrop of audit culture and algorithmic extractivism, I argue that the push to open qualitative data risks reproducing colonial and neoliberal logics under the banner of reform – a risk that should not be taken lightly.