Open Science for Qualitative Research

Open scholarship practices – often also referred to as open research or open science – are increasingly seen as relevant to the research lifecycle. What open scholarship looks like in practice will inevitably vary by field, methodology, epistemology, access to resources, and other considerations. In this article, we outline a few important considerations for researchers who utilize qualitative research methods in deciding which open scholarship practices are most applicable for their own work and suggest a few practices that may be of interest, namely data sharing, preregistration, negative case analysis, audit trails, and member checking. Engagement or disengagement of any given practice should be guided by demands of research epistemology, context, community, topic, and methodology. Finally, we suggest a few places for researchers to start if they wish to learn more about open scholarship more broadly and engage with critical conversations around these practices.