Open Science As Foundation of Overcoming Replicability Issues in Social Sciences: The Case of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Open Research Data (TIPD)

There have been growing concerns in academic communities about scientific replicability and thus research credibility issues in the past decade. Such situation leads to the call for open science to cope with replicability issues. The calls for “Open Science” emerge due to the flaws of “Closed Science”, e.g., issues of scientific replicability and reproducibility, and barriers of accessing data and knowledge systems. One important feature of open science is it allows us to examine research “replicability” given the same method and data. By definition, open science is the movement to make scientific research methods, data, results being accessible to all communities. Open science consists of six principles: open data, open source, open methods, open peer review, open access, and open educational research (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science). To enhance research transparency, the most important elements of open science are open data, open source, open method, and open access. Open data refer to the data that can be available to everyone to use and republish without restrictions of any forms, including copyright, patents, and/or other mechanism controls. With open data and open source serving as enhancing transparency, open methods and open access enable us to examine research replicability and thus credibility. This research uses Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Open Research Data (TIPD) as Example to manifest how open science can serve as a foundation of overcoming replicability issues in social sciences. The ongoing research project of TIPD starts since 2013 (see TIPD web at http://TIPD.sinica.edu.tw; TIPD open data repository at https://osf.io/e4rvz/). TIPD is constructed by strictly following the principles of open science. The contributions of TIPD based on open science principles are as follows: changes in research from “close” to “open”; from “the elite” to “the ordinary”; from “local” to “global”; from “macro and static” to “micro and dynamic”.