This article also appeared as a guest post on 1 July 2026 on the blog of the Brandenburg Open Access Networking and Competence Centre (https://open-access-brandenburg.de/gastbeitrag-wertesensible-ansaetze-fuer-die-open-science-beratung/)
Hantow, Jonas (2026): “Guest post: Between FAIRness and responsibility: Value-sensitive approaches to open science consultancy.” DOI: 10.59350/gepex-r1g49
“As open as possible, as closed as necessary.”
This sentence is quoted so often in Open Science contexts that it can almost sound like a solution in itself. It is not. It is a very good starting point, though. But in everyday consulting practice, the fascinating part usually begins with the second half of the sentence: What exactly is necessary? Who decides? And necessary for whom?
At BiblioCon 2026 (May 19-22, 2026 Berlin), we explored these questions in our hands-on lab “Between FAIRness and Responsibility: Value-sensitive approaches for Open Science consulting”. The workshop was aimed especially at people working in libraries, data services and research infrastructures who support researchers in publishing data, objects and sources. Our starting point was a tension that many consultants know very well: Open Science encourages us to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. At the same time, there are cases when full openness is not possible, not appropriate or simply ethically not responsible.
Value-sensitive Open Science
This becomes particularly palpable in object-centred and data-intensive disciplines. A digitised museum object is not just a file. Archaeological data are not just coordinates. Historical sources are not neutral just because they are old. They may be connected to people, communities, cultural heritage, fragile sites, vulnerable species, institutional interests or contested histories.
The FAIR principles helps us to think about technical and infrastructural quality. CARE, developed for Indigenous Data Governance, adds an important ethical and political layer: collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics. But CARE also has a specific origin and a specific addressee. It was designed for indigenous contexts. Many of its concerns can be conveyed into other contexts, but they should not simply be generalized as if all sensitive cases were the same.
This is where Value Sensitive Design becomes a useful inspiration for us as an additional lens. For now, we propose an adaptation as “Value Sensitive Data Publishing”. It neither replaces FAIR nor CARE. Rather, it helps to clarify what exactly is at stake in a given publication decision. Which values matter here? Which direct and indirect stakeholders are affected? Which conflicts between values become visible? And how can these conflicts be managed, i.e. translated into practical design decisions, workflows, metadata, licenses or access levels?
Workshop
In the workshop, we discussed this through three fictional but realistic cases.
The first case dealt with fictional excavation data from Göbeklitepe. Historical handwritten lists had been digitised, made full-text searchable with OCR and enriched with FAIR metadata. From an Open Science perspective, this sounds like a desired outcome. But what if the data contain precise coordinates of places of discovery? What if publication of those coordinates could enable looting? Or what if such data and archaeological interpretations shaped by specific Western epistemologies are used to eclipse local cultural narratives? How to handle scholarly claims and political claims? Here, values such as transparency, reproducibility and reusability meet the need to protect cultural heritage, site preservation and sources. “Open” may therefore mean: make metadata visible, document the dataset, contextualize, explain access conditions, but do not publish everything at full resolution and maximum precision by default.
The second scenario focused on sacred objects from Latin America in a German museum. High-resolution 3D models were ready for publication, including information on dimensions, materials and historical descriptions. But one object contained a specific ochre tone that, according to the case description, should not be seen by women in the community of origin for religious reasons. This example shows very clearly that values are not limited to privacy or the protection of individual persons. Cultural goods can require protection. So can religious practices, community knowledge and relationships between institutions and source communities. How can the scholarly and wider public interest in access, availability, and reuse be balanced with culturally specific taboos in this case? And in natural history collections, we may have to think even further: information about nesting sites, for example of a protected bird species, can be sensitive because its availability would affect animals and their habitats. Even just a group of well-intended bird-watchers can pose a disruptive element for a natural setting. Value-sensitive publication therefore needs a broader concept beyond “personal data” and privacy alone. This is even more true, when deep text and data mining combined with automatic, AI based synoptic tools allow for broad triangulation of data resources.
The third case concerned digitised books from the colonial period of the German Empire. Here, Open Access and the question of proper contextualization can conflict. Should racist images, discriminatory terminology and imperial narratives be made openly available and even provided for possible reuse, as the application of a CC BY licence would entail? We think the more expedient question would be: Under which conditions can Open Access support critical engagement instead of reproducing harm? Contextualisation should not be understood as an obstacle to openness, but as one of its enabling conditions. Users also have an agency and responsibility to engage critically with the material. Infrastructures can help them do so: through usage notes, provenance information, explanatory metadata, essays, teaching materials or links to current research.
This also changes how we think about licences. In many Open Access contexts, CC BY is the default reflex and demand. But when dealing with sensitive historical sources, objects or images, a more restrictive licence such as CC BY-ND may sometimes better support the goal of preventing decontextualised or misleading derivatives. This does not mean that CC BY-ND is always the answer. It means that licence choice is itself a value-sensitive decision.
One important distinction emerged repeatedly: Open Access for research publications and Open Access for sources are not the same thing. A journal article, an interpreted dataset, a 3D scan of a sacred object, a colonial photograph and a precise locality record of a protected species all have different conditions of – ethical – openness. Treating them as if they followed the same logic makes consulting easier, but also leaves more space for potentially improper or even malfeasant reuse.
Takeaways
What did we take away from this session?
- First: “as open as possible, as closed as necessary” remains a useful principle, but it must be operationalised in a more differentiated way in order to consider ethical categories.
- Second: openness is not a binary switch. It can, for instance, be implemented granular, tiered, contextualised, documented and revisited.
- Third: good Open Science consulting does not only ask “How do we publish this?” It also asks: “What could happen if we do?”, thus including impact assessment.
- Fourth: value-sensitive data publishing is not about saying no to openness. It is about making openness more precise, more responsible and more useful.
That is perhaps the most important point. Context, restrictions and care are not the enemies of Open Science. In many cases, they are what makes Open Science possible.
BiblioCon 2026:
Conference website (in German): https://www.bib-info.de/fortbildung/bibliothekartage/bibliocon-2026-bib
Workshop-Session: https://bibliocon2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/details/sessions/151
Abstract: https://bibliocon2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/details/presentations/145
More information on CC-BY-ND licenes:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/deed.en
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