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The Humanities as a Symptom, Not an Exception:Conceptual Misalignment in Research Data Policy

ENOMOTO, Takuto and NAGATO, Yusuke (2026) The Humanities as a Symptom, Not an Exception:Conceptual Misalignment in Research Data Policy. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Open science policy increasingly treats making research data publicly available, shareable, and reusable as a default norm. When implementation remains uneven, this difficulty is often explained by reference to researchers’ insufficient knowledge, lack of incentives, inadequate compliance, or reluctance to share. This paper argues that such an individual-deficit explanation is incomplete. Some difficulties in making research data publicly available arise from conceptual misalignments concerning data and openness. First, researchers may not recognize their materials as data; second, they may employ different conceptions of data; third, they may disagree about which attributes—such as storability, retrievability, digitality, machine-readability, evidentiality, and reusability—matter for research data. Similarly, openness should not be reduced to public access or treated as an all-or-nothing condition; it is partial and gradational. The paper then examines the humanities as a symptomatic case in which these misalignments become especially visible. Rather than treating the humanities as an exception to a standard open-data model, it uses them to motivate a methodological pluralism about research data policy. The resulting policy lesson is not to weaken open science, but to design data openness constructively, in ways responsive to the epistemic and ethical conditions of diverse research practices.

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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
ENOMOTO, Takutoharmonica0308@gmail.com0009-0000-0251-2059
NAGATO, Yusuke
Keywords: research data; open science; openness; methodological pluralism; humanities; research data policy
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Computation/Information
General Issues > Science and Policy
Depositing User: Dr. Takuto ENOMOTO
Date Deposited: 05 Jun 2026 14:43
Last Modified: 05 Jun 2026 14:43
Item ID: 29903
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Computation/Information
General Issues > Science and Policy
Date: June 2026
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/29903

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