Call for Papers

The Routledge Handbook of Open Source Investigations

Open source investigations (OSINV) leverage the widespread availability of natively digital or digitized data to build narratives about “what actually happened” that rely on source and methodological transparency and replicability to convince readers. 

Given their close ties to the digital subcultures that emerged on the internet in the early 2000s, open source investigations also incorporate many of the cultural traits that emerged on the internet in the early 2000s – especially those characteristic of hacker culture, such as collaboration and an orientation towards social justice. 

OSINV involves techniques usually associated with surveillance, cybersecurity, and intelligence. And yet, the discipline increasingly develops novel methodologies that appropriate and even subvert the affordances of new media and digital platforms. 

Thus, OSINV is increasingly becoming a popular practice of civil society organizations and a sub-genre of investigative journalism, producing some of the most high-impact stories of the last years, such as the MH17 case elucidated by Bellingcat through careful analysis of user-generated content posted on social media, or the killing of civilians by Cameroonian soldiers, unraveled by the BBC Africa Eye by analyzing a video circulating on social media.

The Routledge Handbook of Open Source Investigations offers academics, practitioners, and journalists an opportunity to come together to negotiate, define, and push the boundaries of this new field. Open-source investigations are interesting to research because they can be seen as a paradigmatic expression of one of the most significant issues in contemporary society: to what extent can we believe and trust what we see in an increasingly complex and pervasive digital media ecosystem? With this handbook, we invite the reader to go beyond that question and instead explore “how” they can better analyze and critique what they see online.

Therefore, the purpose of this book is to present a collection of theoretical, methodological, and case-based contributions that survey one of the fastest-growing and attention-grabbing practices in journalism and the social sciences today.

This handbook reframes open-source investigations as a communicative practice with its own rationale, rather than as a technical extension of intelligence work. By doing so, it provides a comprehensive foundation for a field that is expanding rapidly but lacks shared vocabulary, standards, and pedagogical resources. In doing so, it establishes OSINV as a hybrid practice of inquiry where journalists, researchers, technologists, archivists, and civic communities collectively build public evidence for a digital age. OSINV expansion is remarkably fast: newsrooms are increasingly hiring OSINV experts and collaborating with OSINV organizations, universities are creating OSINV courses and labs, human rights organizations are integrating the practice into accountability mechanisms, and civil society groups and citizen communities apply it to local problems: from police violence and disappearances to environmental crimes and election interference.

Additionally, the handbook places OSINV as a field equally defined by its investigative process and publications, as by the social and epistemic commitments behind them. Key debates concern OSINV’s mission grounded in democracy, transparency, and accountability. In this endeavor, tensions emerge when the open-source culture and techniques challenge traditional hierarchies of expertise, verification routines, and newsroom cultures. OSINV also operates in the gray spaces that connect it with adjacent, complementary practices, such as fact-checking, data journalism, digital forensics, and human rights documentation, among others. Thus, questions remain as to whether it is a technique, a profession, or a community with its own standards. These debates intersect with structural challenges that include increased platform opacity, diminished data access, and the need for specialized technical knowledge. There are also ethical and protective concerns, like investigators facing legal retaliation, harassment, doxxing, traumatic content, and political repression, risks that are increasing with a global turn towards authoritarianism. This makes digital security, physical safety, mental health, and responsible publication key considerations.

For this call for papers, we welcome theoretical and empirical contributions, whether computational, ethnographic, comparative, historical, or case-based works.

Theoretical, historical, and conceptual foundations

• Origins of open-source investigation.
• What is OSINV? Public-interest investigation as a communicative practice (and how it distances itself from traditional intelligence collection).
• OSINV as practice vs. OSINV as community.
• Epistemology of open-source investigation and its socio-technical infrastructures.
• Open-source evidence as public narrative, public argument, and contestation.
• Opportunities and tensions between OSINV and traditional journalism.
• Interfaces with other communities: data journalism, fact-checking, digital forensics, civic tech, citizen witnesses, local newsrooms.
• Platform politics and OSINV: data access, API shutdowns, disinformation campaigns, platform governance, algorithmic opacity.

Core OSINV abilities and investigative techniques

• Geolocation, chronolocation, remote sensing, and satellite analysis.
• Image and video verification.
• Social-media account investigation.
• Acoustic OSINV.
• Document analysis and verification.
• Local journalism and archives as open source.
• Investigating inside messaging apps: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.
• Archiving and preservation (hashing, metadata capture, chain of custody, etc).
• Investigative reporting with AI-era media.

International cases and applied investigations

• Humanitarian and armed-conflict investigations.
• Searching for missing people.
• Protest analysis and verification.
• Fact-checking and debunking as OSINV.
• Environmental and climate-related investigations.
• OSINV and courts.

Protections, ethics, and well-being

• Investigators as targets: harassment, doxxing, retaliation, counter-disinformation, legal threats.
• Digital and physical security for researchers and journalists.
• Mental health: from exposure and trauma to prevention and protocols.
• Working with vulnerable communities: consent, anonymity, minimizing harm.
• Global asymmetries: bandwidth, censorship, connectivity, political risk, resource inequalities
• Ethical publication: when evidence should not be published and why.
• Failures and limitations: data gaps, hoaxes, platform opacity, state suppression, legal threats.

 OSINV education, infrastructure, and sustainability

• Teaching OSINV in and out of the classroom: methods and experiences.
• Infrastructure and archiving.
• Funding and sustainability.
• Collaboration models (journalists, NGOs, civic communities, geeks, others).
• Future of OSINV: generative AI, deepfakes, closed platforms, etc.

Submission Instructions

Please submit an extended abstract (500 words) along with a 100–150-word biography for each author. Extended abstracts should be sent by email to doddsrojas@wisc.edu.

Selected authors will be invited to submit full chapters of approximately 6,000 words.

Abstract submission deadline (500 words): August 31, 2026

Acceptance notifications: September 30, 2026

Full chapter submission (7,000–10,000 words): February 28, 2027

Editorial/reviewer feedback returned: April 30, 2027

Revised chapter submission: July 31, 2027

Final manuscript delivered to Routledge: August 2027 

Editorial team

Tomás Dodds, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alexa Koenig, University of California, Berkeley

Guillén Torres, University of California, Berkeley

Gisela Pérez de Acha, University of California, Berkeley

Elohim Monard, University of Wisconsin-Madison