Do we need an Open Science coalition? | Elephant in the Lab
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2018-09-04
Summary:
What exactly is open science? It can be a social justice issue, part of a political capitalist regime or a form of traditional science. Open Science is a strange concept. Depending on who you speak to, it can be a set of scientific practices, a social justice issue, a complete fad, part of a political capitalist regime, or just a different but undefinable form of traditional science.
This variety in thought is at once both a strength of Open Science, and its greatest weakness. Clearly a diversity of views on whatever Open Science is helps us to create a vision of what it is in reality as a boundary object– something that is universally understood and immutable only in part, so as to be taken up by diverse communities in a range of ways; something befitting from the great diversity of the scientific enterprise while retaining its integrity. However, a lack of appropriate and common definition and understanding also opens Open Science up to exploitation. For example, if Open Science is just defined as a set of research practices, then providing services to support them can be deemed as Open Science. Indeed, the fact that many commercial entities consider Open Science to be a business model is quite divergent from the original purposes and intents, for example outlined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (Richard Poynder, 2012). Similarly, much of the political motivation for Open Science in Europe sees it as a mechanism for innovation and economic growth (European Commission, 2017). However, if one deems Open Science to include value-based dimensions such as equity, justice, as well as technical factors like open source, then many services that superficially appear to support open scientific practices are divergent from it in other ways. In fact, the Open Science community has yet to appropriately decide on what these core values behind (open) research are, and how this translates from good scientific practices and norms established in a non-digital age.