Building Open Science Communities: The Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI)?

The Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI) is a thriving online community of 430+ current, former, and incoming social science journal editors, data professionals, and metascientists. JEDI provides an online forum that has hosted numerous discussion threads on open science and journal editing. Drawing on information and materials provided in these discussions by its members, JEDI has also begun to compile a substantial collection of open science resources directed at journal editors. The community is organized by the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS), a voluntary partnership of organizations created to archive, catalog, and preserve social science research data, and has received continued funding from the NSF. In this short talk, we will first present JEDI — how its origins, rooted in discussions on editorial processes concerning data, code, and their management — has evolved to encompass topics as diverse as citation practices, research transparency and accessibility, and peer review, among others. Then, we will share insights from JEDI’s three years of existence that we believe are applicable to other scientific communities as well: how to build and sustain community within academia, what challenges JEDI has encountered and how we have tackled them, and how open science plays a central role both as an objective and a guiding principle for JEDI.