Spectrum of Open Methods

<p>In order for Open Methods to mitigate resource barriers to linguistics research, the Open Methods themselves must not act as or require <em>substantial</em> resource barriers to access and use. We emphasize &quot;substantial&quot; here because there is no such thing as an absence of resource barriers; just because an Open Method is freely <em>available</em> online doesn&#39;t make it <em>accessible</em> to everyone. To evaluate this aspect of Open Methods, we build on similar widely-used tools in the Open Access space to create a &quot;Spectrum of Open Methods&quot;.</p> <p>This tool is not meant to gatekeep open methods; a method that&#39;s imperfect but published is always more open than a method that never gets published because it&#39;s not perfect yet. Rather, the Spectrum of Open Methods is intended to inspire creators to make adjustments to their resources to make them as open as possible. To illustrate, a Case Study is included where Dan Villarreal has deployed the Spectrum of Open Methods to one of his projects and identified avenues for future development and improvement.</p> <p>We developed this tool while working on a chapter titled &quot;Open Methods: Decolonizing (or not) research methods in linguistics&quot; for the forthcoming volume <em>Decolonizing Linguistics </em>edited by Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz and published by Oxford University Press. We welcome iterations of this Spectrum of Open Methods with edits, adaptations to other fields, or discipline-specific adjustments.</p>