Re-Renderability as niche concept: maintaining epistemic pluralism amidst the emerging regime of open research

Research funders worldwide are starting to mandate open access data be output alongside publications, often brandishing the threat of defunding research as a form of governmentality to counter non-compliance - including for interpretivist-inspired research. In configuring a regime of open research, their impetus is steeped within a democratic ethos of transparency derived from scientific revolution and Enlightenment thinking. However, doing so risks epistemic oppression, shoe-horning research into formats that privilege realist modes of inquiry. Drawing on primary research with qualitative researchers (including a scoping survey, semi-structured interviews, and a stakeholder workshop) paired with a review of literature across eight academic databases, we propose ‘re renderability’ as a niche alternative to reproducibility and replicability. Albeit, we do so by approaching science in a Hegelian sense of die Wissenschaft, not as parochially STEM-centric. We argue re-renderability offers a better fit for interpretivist-aligned research, where a ‘storying the story’ of analysis supplants assumptions of directly repeatability and/or any supposed disentanglement of researcher from context, whilst enabling interpretivist researchers’ claims to be opened for evaluation and scrutiny. Moreover, re-renderability remains sensitive to interpretivist-inspired modes of inquiry that do not produce data artefacts per se, i.e. research conducted as process and end unto itself, as action seeking to bring about change, as participatory and/or co-constructive collaborations, that generates intrinsic value, or that employs Indigenous and/or embodied ways of knowing beyond the purview of Western logos realism.