What are the Usage Dimensions of Open?

What are the usage-related challenges currently faced by open efforts? For instance, open data is intriguing in principle, but in reality, making underlying data open can be problematic, conflicting with the need for research secrecy (whether driven by the desire to be first to publish, or the desire of funders to hold onto data to protect future discovery potential), the potential for misinterpretation by other researchers, and so on. Publishing clinical trial data in open formats is also intriguing but would run afoul of many current consent agreements, particularly older consents. Open access is similarly challenged in some instances by a conflict between which version of papers is allowed appear in open repositories. What is the value of archiving non-final versions? What are the range of issues here, what are the perspectives, and what might be some possible solutions?

Report from the Usage Dimensions of Open Workgroup

The Usage Dimensions of Open workgroup came together and considered definitions and priorities around its topic. From priorities, themes were identified. One theme included the character of research outputs and the actual research workflow process. The second theme represented economic considerations. Stakeholders were identified, and solutions consid­ered. Solutions included both short- and long-term actions.OSI2016 Workgroup QuestionWhat are the usage-related challenges currently faced by open efforts? For instance, open data is intriguing in principle, but in reality, making underlying data open can be problematic, con­flicting with the need for research secrecy (whether driven by the desire to be first to publish, or the desire of funders to hold onto data to protect future discovery potential), the potential for misinterpretation by other researchers, and so on. Publishing clinical trial data in open formats is also intriguing but would run afoul of many current consent agreements, particularly older consents. Open access is similarly challenged in some instances by a con­flict between which versions of papers is allowed to appear in open repositories. What is the value of archiving non-final versions? What is the range of issues here, what are the perspec­tives, and what might be some possible solutions?

Operationalizing mirativity

This study focuses on the conceptual category of mirativity and its constructional construal in English. We propose an operationalization of mirativity with a view to investigating the phenomenon within the usage-based quantitative methodology of multifactorial analysis (Geeraerts, Grondelaers, & Bakema, 1994; Gries, 2003). The proposed operationalization is founded on two usage dimensions, i.e., the degree of performativity of the utterance and the degree of incongruity of the described event. It is argued that mirativity, in its prototypical form, can be operationally defined as a combination of high levels of these two variables. The feasibility of this operationalization in usage-based quantitative research is tested in a case study investigating three surprise-encoding constructions in English: [what + the + np], [what + a + np] and [to + my + np]. The data, amounting to 350 observations of the three constructions, were extracted from dialogic online diaries and submitted to detailed manual annotation and subsequent multivariate statistical modeling. The results reveal a usage continuum ranging from [what + the + np] through [to + my + np] to [what + a + np] relative to the high degrees of performativity and incongruity.