Paper long abstract:

The epistemology of social science makes it so that research is produced at a slower pace with grounded approaches in contrast to the life sciences where a more positivist approach is used (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The FAIR principles in Open Science challenged researchers who work with qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, interview-based case studies, and interpretivist approaches, to make their data inter-operable and reusable. In this article, the authors look closely at the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016), and discuss their implementation on such research projects at a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The paper draws from an ethnographic account of the 26 months negotiations to implement a Faculty FAIR action plan. The negotiations involved positioning the Open-Access-Repositories, and Data-Management-Plans as tools to make ethnographic data Findable and Accessible. The author's speak from their positionalities as Researcher and Data Steward. They examine how this process has led them to re-think their ethnographic methodologies and question their freedom to do Science. They argue that although the FAIR principles are an innovative tool for machine-readable data, the principles and tools, as they stand, are exclusive of certain forms of qualitative data where the researcher, as a knowledge-producer, is inseparable from their data. For FAIR to be inclusive of qualitative Science, it requires a reflexive reimagining of the principles in order to adapt them to a plurality of research approaches in the scientific community.