I’ve been replacing software with open source alternatives for years, and a few folk have asked how this works with research. One of the most important aspects of being an independent researcher was making research easier to access, understand, and use in the real world. And just like my much-laboured point that research is not value neutral, and should be done in line with our social change ethos, technology can and should be operated with a conscience. That’s a lot easier to do a) when the people dominating the industry aren’t lining themselves up behind proto-dictators and b) when we know what our software is actually doing.
And it can be free. Maybe I should have led with that. (And if you listen carefully you’ll also hear the plaintive cry of an anguished tech billionaire.)
As an independent consultant and researcher, I use a variety of research-specific and day-to-day software. In my view, technology (including software) is not inherently evil or problematic: but it is at the vanguard of a highly problematic system. It depends on who owns it, runs it, benefits from it, and who bears the burdens. Many of the practices of large tech and software corporations are not defensible ethically. For example, a basic tenet of social research is safeguarding sensitive or private information. But if that information is stored or shared within ecosystems designed to trawl it for marketing, AI development, and so on, how can we guarantee this?
Countering tech monopolies is an approach that many would like to take, but it can be difficult or daunting to find good alternatives to dominant corporations. To help other researchers, students, and others working on similar things, I keep a list of the open-source software and approaches I use. This is also to help draw attention to good projects. Remember: community run projects need citing, like you would other resources you draw on. If you use a community -made resource regularly, consider donating to it.
Community supported, open-source software provides a model for collaborative working that challenges the profit- and extraction-centric logics of big tech companies. I like to think of this aspect as a kind of prefigurative politics: it’s a mode of relating to others that anticipates a better, fairer system, even as it has to compromise to survive in the current one. By being open source, there can be greater confidence over what is happening to the data as it is auditable by anyone familiar with code. This also typically means the software is free to use. To make that happen, the project is usually supported by small donations from its community of users, or in the case of research focused software, sometimes hosted by universities or academic projects.
There’s an additional benefit in avoiding the ludicrous e-waste we generate in the constant search for false novelty. For hardware like laptops, desktops, and smartphones, open-source software and firmware can often rescue older tech by being less resource heavy (see specially ‘operating system’) – that means saving a device from waste and getting more life out of it. The most ‘sustainable’ tech is the stuff you already have (or someone else has). Personally, I like using 2nd hand devices (from a reputable place) in this way, you just need to remember to scrub the storage drives: don’t rely on the previous (or next) owner to do it.
The below list will be updated as I learn more. And, I’ve assumed folk reading this are not experts – because the transition from broligarchy needs to be accessible!
Anyone needing dedicated, and often very expensive, research software for qualitative, quantitative, field-based and desk-based work may find this useful. If you work for a university, check that you’re actually allowed to use software that isn’t prescribed for interviewing, surveying, storing, etc.
try Zotero – “collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research”, as they say. It’s free, community-supported, and open source. It can even speak to other software, such as web browsers (see below on that). I like its group work credentials so you can use free software to collaborate with people and organisations that don’t have expensive subscription models. Very handily, you can tell it which precise referencing format to output in (e.g. all the Chicagos and Harvards, etc.) to match your university, publication, or other style guide. Also check out CiteAs, especially for citing more obscure things.
A note to students: learn to cite and compile a bibliography manually first! All referencing software will output occasional errors, and you’ll only spot this if you know what you’re looking at.
try CATMA – this a good alternative to archive / corpus management and analysis software like Nvivo. I’ve been recommending it to students who a) hate Nvivo’s complexity and b) cannot access it through their university (which varies a lot). It handles thematic analysis (a widely used qualitative research approach) very well, plus you can manage groups for collaboration, including new users. It’s also pretty resource efficient and can run in-browser for older systems. All free! Combining this with Zotero makes for easy solo or group work on annotating and analysing documents, and keeping track of the references. I organised a participatory discourse analysis summer school on greenwashing with CATMA, and folk (all new users) really liked it.
For replacing the university mainstay SPSS, there are a few options and you might want to experiment. GNU PSPP, made by Free Software Foundation – who also support a brilliant range of other software – has a long history and is well supported. Don’t worry too much about the GNU side of things, you can download a version of PSPP straight to a Windows, MacOS, or Linux system (more on these below…). The other option is JASP which is maintained by academics at the University of Amsterdam.
Lovers of R language statistics likely already know their options, as this language allows for a lot flexibility. For everyone else, you can learn new languages like R and this genuinely will replace proprietary software, make you part of a pretty handy community, and even help you get started with programming. My only issue with recommending using R directly is the learning curve. It isn’t practical or efficient for people just dabbling in statistics, but hardcore quants researchers will probably find it rewarding.
Note to students: Manual transcription can be annoying. But I do still think it has the edge if typing is accessible to you. This isn’t an anti-tech stance (although transcription software still discriminates against many accents and languages), it’s methodological and just regular logical. Any output from your software will still have to be checked over line-by-line manually for the inevitable errors. It (probably) won’t capture things like sighing, laughing, etc, but these are important. And methodologically, the whole point is getting familiar with your data. Listening carefully and reproducing is just part of that – treat transcribing as the first analytical pass over your data. Finally – if your super-accurate AI software is doing the work, that’s because it’s passing it to a cloud-based service where you are mostly likely giving away rights on it. That’s ethically dodgy (is a participant’s interview data ‘yours’ to give away?). You can install a local-only LLM to ensure no cloud based anything is involved, and eat up your own processing power / energy. By the time you’ve done all that you should have just transcribed it manually.
Answer 2: we’re still doing machines, so what’s the best for avoiding data leakage and the big AIs? There’s only one solution I’ve played with here, which is Whishper – it’s a local-only large language model for audio-to-text (so your data stays where it should – in your hands). There’s a bit of messing around to install it locally, but this isn’t especially complicated. The issue is that both its speed and accuracy are resource dependent – if you have lots of processing power (and a graphics processing unit might help), plus you can store the largest language model locally, you’ll get better results. That’s inherent to how AI works, though, you’re just doing that work on your own hardware. And remember: there’s still an error rate! In English, that averages about 4% on this model with larger language model.
Paid-for platforms in academic literature are at the root of the grotesque academic publishing industry. I’ve worked with a fabulous group recently to establish a new journal founded on egalitarian, open access, peer review, and accessibility principles – but this is only one field. Unfortunately there are no immediate solutions to this systemic problem, and even open access tools can only index what is there. That said, there are some great indexing tools. Elsevier runs the paid-for industry standard ‘Scopus’, and many academics maintain an Elsevier boycott. Semantic Scholar is non-profit and free to use. It isn’t open source, but the free versions of Lens offer full function for patent and literature searching.
Try Citation Gecko for a way to visualise relevant literature as a web of interconnecting knowledge (what, at its best, academic literature ought to be). ‘Connected papers’ and ‘Litmaps’ offer similar things, but with a pricing model (with a free basic option). This is a great way of finding where the relevant arguments are, even though in reality it’s just a neat way of visualising citation links. Students: This is a nifty visual reminder that academic papers do not stand alone – your reviewing should ask ‘what is missing? Where can I contribute? Who dis/agrees with whom’ not ‘which single paper agrees with me?’.
Anyone using IT who dislikes being beholden to the (very!) dominant companies for things like word processing, the operating system, email, and file storage may find this list useful. Some are small and easy, while others (like the operating system and getting rid of Microsoft) require unlearning and re-learning: and therefore patience.
I’ve done zero research on this, but I would guess when most people say, “I hate this computer”, they are really hating the operating system. Linux is free, open source, increasingly mainstream, and you can change basically anything about it. It’s a bit of a journey away from Windows or MacOS, but you don’t need to be a programmer to make it work anymore. Try an aesthetically pleasing, simple version like Linux Ubuntu. It comes with a bunch of free, open-source software and a simplified installation method for other software. You can probably get away without touching the command line, and in increasingly works great for games (if that’s your thing). For laptops that have a lot of speciality hardware to make them work, like the Surface models, there are usually workarounds for popular models. For instance I run Ubuntu on a Surface Go with stylus support for marking up documents, which has fairly poor specs but is saved by this much more resource-efficient operating system.
The downside that’s also an upside? Microsoft software will never play nicely with it, so read on for how to work around that…
Android and Apple dominate here, and that blends with their wider information ecosystems. Especially in Google’s/Android’s case, this is based on the extraction of data for its business model. But both encourage the creepy extraction of data from body sensors, location, buying habits, and so on. But smartphones are also super-locked-down things and changing their operating system has only recently become a non-expert possibility, and it’s limited to popular models of phone as each model variant needs its own solution. Popular choices are e/os and LineageOS. That means you can grab a second-hand or stuffed-in-a-draw Pixel 1-through-8 and bung one of these operating systems on it for a cheap, no-extra-environmental-impact and Google-free work phone.
But these are major changes for your day-to-day phone. If you want to reduce your data leakage, there are a couple of good, in-the-background tools. One is duckduckgo – install it from Play Store, and activate its ‘app tracking protection’ tool that blocks data leaks – plus it gives you a horrifying counter of those leaks. Proton VPN on mobile does the same thing. On my phone, Proton VPN counts substantially more data requests than duckduckgo – it’s unclear to me if this just wildly ambitious, a different counting criteria, or actually far more effective.
(Shout out to Fairphone who can ship their excellent phones de-googled by default, but second-hand is still the fairest of them all.)
Proton email is free and privacy focused, without ads, and is open source. Exchanges can be end-to-end encrypted, meaning only you and your recipients can read your email (Gmail, Outlook, and similar like to snoop…). Technically, if you’re working in the UK or EU, end-to-end encryption is how you should be working with sensitive information, so you’ll please the GDPR regs too. This is not a community developed model as most of the others in this list, and it is based on a pricing model for users requiring more services than the free version. A shout out also to Tuta Mail for a similar offer.
Given they’ve been around forever, these can seem inescapable. But Libre Office is a free, open-source, community-supported office suite giving alternatives to all the Microsoft stuff. You can open and save in Microsoft filetypes, too (e.g. .docx) so it doesn’t matter if everyone else still uses Microsoft. Its layout can be changed to look a bit more like Microsoft’s interface. You can also get a free PDF editing tool through Libre Draw.
Top tip: If you’re opening Microsoft stuff through Libre, install the Aptos typeface family (for free, and very easily) on your system, which is Microsoft’s default in its newest versions. Otherwise Libre will reach for another typeface every time you open a Microsoft document through it, and things might not look quite right.
There’s no getting away from it, and Zoom and Microsoft are keen to keep it that way. But, you don’t have to pay them oodles of money and they aren’t by default the right choice for sensitive research. For that, you need something end-to-end encrypted (update: both Zoom and Teams can now be made to follow this standard, e.g. if you pay for Teams Premium). Depending on where you’re working and in what areas, this could be a safety issue for you or a participant – you don’t want physical eavesdroppers on a highly sensitive conversation, so why risk digital ones? I’ve had success with JITSI. You can use their servers for free and generate shareable URLs for scheduling. For the power users, you can set up your own server with their open source model with their handbook. This requires some expertise, but the result is a wholly owned, free video conferencing service.
Adobe’s Acrobat Pro is the paid-for software being replaced here. It’s dominant for a reason – Adobe created the PDF filetype. But now it’s entirely dominated the ‘finished document’ standard, screw their monopolising of the software to read and edit it. For simply reading PDFs you have endless choice – including most internet browsers (see below). Editing is a little more complicated, but my go-to is Libre Draw – if you’re seeing lots of text issues it may be you need to install more typeface / font packages, especially Aptos which is the Microsoft default. Luckily PDF editor alternatives is a hot open source topic.
As much as I love a physical book, traipsing the average personal academic library around is not practical. Kindle et al may seem a good free option, but arguably not an ethical one. Try Calibre – open source and free. Also check out the open library.
Krita is widely used as a replacement for Photoshop, and accepts stylus inputs etc in a similar way. It’s open source and free, and apparently made by artists. I don’t use much visual creative software so this serves my few needs. There is a lively discussion about Photoshop alternatives for those who have greater needs, and GIMP is apparently also a solid alternative (also open source and free).
Although most used by designers etc, it’s occasionally necessary to be able to open and export vector graphics, for instance if dealing with brand logos. Inkscape is my go-to on the odd occasion I need to do this.
Proton and Mega Sync are my go-to for syncing and backup where OneDrive (etc) would normally work. They’re open source and offer a free basic package (remember this is expensive physical infrastructure, so beware too-good-to-be-true “free” cloud storage – you’ll be paying somehow). Unlike many cloud options, these are both end-to-end encrypted: the way we should be managing any sensitive, personal, or private stuff. It’s the best way to comply with GDPR regulations for handling data (which should be encrypted in transit etc.) by default. It means not even the hosting company (or anyone else ‘in the middle’) can decrypt anything. Until Q day! But hopefully they’ll have a post-quantum solution by then…
(By the way, this means if you work with me, you’ll get encrypted links to access anything we share. (Any relevant data is also backed up and encrypted offline.))
Firefox and its Mozilla Foundation owner are good people: community supported and working for a better, fairer internet. It’s free, with the added good feeling that a Google exec is probably grumbling about it somewhere. Shout outs also go to Brave Browser (I just dislike the crypto-bro vibes) and DuckDuckGo browser. A quick disclaimer: websites should be optimised for a range of browsers, but this isn’t always the case. Some websites work better in Firefox than others, sometimes Google Crome works best. BUT: don’t use Chrome when this is the case, use a Chromium-based offshoot like Brave Browser. All of these mentions work on mobile, too. (Not-so-pro tip: download the DuckDuckGo browser on your phone and enjoy blocking much of the tracking software that apps deploy by turning on the separate ‘app tracking protection’. And return to this list when you see how many trackers there are…)
The original “If you don’t pay for it, you are the product” battleground. Google search is highly dominant, and highly creepy. DuckDuckGo is a favourite alternative: though it is a private company it is well trusted and included in Firefox by default. Shout out to platforms like DisconnectMe offering a similar end point with a different approach. Brave Search (default in Brave browser) works well – but I’d want to know more about the model behind its AI-generated summaries that are enabled by default. At minimum that’s an energy demand that hasn’t been asked for.
A virtual private network (VPN) is vital on public Wi-Fi, and useful in other contexts too, by securing and obscuring your internet traffic. If I’m away from my normal internet connection, I’m using a (paid for) VPN for everything online to safeguard data. VPNs have serious infrastructure, namely servers operating around the world. That means you shouldn’t just search “free VPN” and trust whatever comes up. There’s a good list available, while trustworthy orgs like Proton have also offered a free version in the past. If you can stretch to it (a few £ a month) a paid-for VPN is best if you have to work on unsecured (e.g. public) Wi-Fi, and in any case where an organisation, internet service provider, or state actor spying on your traffic is a security issue.
Any views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily refelect those of any organisations I work with.
Website design by self.
admin@leatham.scot | © 2026 Scott Leatham | RSC
