Square pegs, round holes: how can we make repositories work for arts research?

What do you think of when you hear the term ‘open science’? And what do practice-based arts researchers think? Might these researchers feel ignored? In parallel, John Kampfner (2017) notes that the UK’s creative industries contribute almost £90 billion net to GDP – and yet policy makers appear not to understand the link between arts education and economic success.

Is the world of repositories and open access guilty of making the same mistake? DARIAH-EU thinks so, responding to the announcement of Plan S (where the ‘S’ stands for science) as revealing ‘a strong bias toward the STEM perspective’ (DARIAH-EU, 2018, p.1). The term open science ‘may seem alienating’ (ibid.) to arts researchers whilst Peter Suber (2018) notes it’s a phrase which is ‘needlessly confusing’.

For practice-based arts researchers, this alienation also manifests itself in repositories which are predominantly designed for traditional text-based outputs; depositing their ‘nuanced, layered [and] ambiguous’ outputs (Meece, Robinson and Gramstadt, 2017, p.211) can seem like putting a square peg in a round hole. So how can we make repositories work better for arts researchers, and avoid a gaping hole developing in the open access (OA) landscape?