This editorial first appeared in UKSG eNews 604 on 20th February 2026, and is reproduced here with permission.
Surfacing a diverse landscape of open research across the arts, humanities and social sciences: The work of the MORPHSS project
Voices in the humanities and qualitative social sciences are increasingly challenging the dominant frameworks of ‘Open Science’ and their application by funders, publishers and institutions, suggesting these are tailored around quantitative research in STEM subjects and overlook the broad range of research methodologies and approaches across different disciplines. In particular, policies and guidelines around openness tend to emphasise practices in support of reproducibility and replication, including pre-registration and open data, code and materials – practices that are more applicable to research in some areas than others. As a result, existing policies and guidelines risk alienating and disadvantaging researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS), for whom these practices and aims are often less relevant or achievable.
Moreover, at a time when open research is increasingly becoming a part of regulatory and evaluation frameworks, treating STEM-focused expectations around openness as universally applicable risks devaluing research in AHSS. Research communities and organisations therefore urgently need to diversify our understanding of ‘openness’ to both accommodate practice across a broader range of disciplines and engage those communities who feel underserved by narratives of open science. This blogpost outlines one contribution towards such efforts to pluralise and diversify ‘openness’, in the work of the Materialising Open Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, or MORPHSS, project.
Introducing the MORPHSS project
Funded by the AHRC, Wellcome Trust and Research England Development (RED) fund, MORPHSS is a three-year project that aims to catalogue, pilot, and showcase open research practices in the arts, humanities and social sciences (AHSS), with a particular focus within the social sciences on qualitative research.
As well as foregrounding the diversity of open practices that are taking place in these areas, we’re working to theorise openness itself in ways that are appropriate for these disciplines – modifying and reimagining existing concepts and applications of ‘open research’.
Documenting open research practices in AHSS
Work on MORPHSS has so far involved cataloguing a range of open research practices across AHSS, resulting in the MORPHSS catalogue, a living resource that currently includes 30 open research practices across these disciplines, from Annotation for Transparent Inquiry to co-production, experimental longform publishing, reflexivity, public scholarship and more. For each practice, a detailed description is accompanied by examples and suggestions of further reading and resources. Many of the practices we’ve identified involve openness with and to a wide range of actors, including research participants and communities, and general audiences.
The MORPHSS catalogue also places each open practice in the context of the MORPHSS typology of openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences – six types of openness we’ve identified in these disciplines.
Epistemic openness is openness to a wide range of forms of knowledge including lived experience, Indigenous knowledges and professional and practice-based knowledge. Participatory openness involves openness to participation and collaboration with individuals and communities outside the academy, through practices like Community-Based Participatory Research. Process openness involves making aspects of the research process available to others via mechanisms like positionality statements or the open documentation of creative methods, while evidentiary openness means sharing research evidence in contextually appropriate ways with research communities or participants. Finally, while availability of outputs means making outputs openly available, accessible communication of research involves communicating research to wider audiences in coherent and engaging ways – via podcasts, for example. This typology is explored more fully in our forthcoming report Openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Documenting open research practices beyond STEM, is available via the MORPHSS repository.
The MORPHSS catalogue is open to feedback and suggestions from researchers and research-supporting colleagues or organisations on how we can improve and expand it. Future versions of the catalogue will be informed by this feedback. In this way, the catalogue is a living resource that will be shaped and developed by the research communities it concerns.
Applications and recommendations
Published under a CC-BY licence, the MORPHSS catalogue can be used by anyone for any purpose, including to develop training materials and resources around open research in AHSS. In particular, we hope it will be useful to librarians and other research support colleagues seeking to develop AHSS-relevant guidance, information, training and advocacy materials around open research.
The MORPHSS report Openness in the arts, humanities and social sciences: Documenting open research practices beyond STEM further includes a number of recommendations for publishers, funders, institutions, learned societies and individual researchers on how to diversify their policy and practice around openness. We emphasise the importance of flexibility, acknowledging diversity of practice, creating inclusive guidance and advocacy materials and engaging with AHSS communities in the review and revision of requirements and expectations.
At a time when AHSS disciplines are underfunded, at risk of devaluation, and in need of evaluation frameworks that recognise their contributions to knowledge and society, we hope the project’s efforts to reimagine openness for the arts, humanities and qualitative social sciences present a timely intervention on behalf of AHSS communities.
Jenni Adams can be found on BlueSky (@jenniad.bsky.social).
Miranda Barnes can be found on BlueSky (@mirandab-oa.bsky.social) and LinkedIn.
Follow the MORPHSS project on BlueSky (@morphss.bsky.social)