Impact of Social Sciences – It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid: Why instrumentalist arguments for Open Access, Open Data, and Open Science are not enough.

I’m increasingly convinced that advocating for openness in research (or government) isn’t nearly enough. There’s been too much of an instrumentalist justification for open data an open access. Many advocates talk about how it will cut costs and speed up research and innovation. They also argue that it will make research more “reproducible” and transparent so interpretations can be better vetted by the wider community. Advocates for openness, particularly in open government, also talk about the wonderful commercial opportunities that will come from freeing research. This last justification boils down to creating a “research commons” in order to remove impediments for (text, data) mining of that commons in order to foster entrepreneurialism and create wealth. This is pretty explicit here in this announcement from Europeana, the EU’s major open culture system (now threatened with devastating cuts). I don’t have a problem with wealth creation as an outcome of greater openness in research. Who doesn’t want more wealth? However we need to ask about wealth creation for whom and under what conditions? Will the lion’s share of the wealth created on newly freed research only go to a tiny elite class of investors? Will it simply mean a bit more profit for Google and a few other big aggregators? Will this wealth be taxed and redistributed enough to support and sustain the research commons exploited to feed it? The fact that the new OSTP embrace of Open Data in research is an unfunded mandate makes me worry about the prospect of “clear-cutting” the open data commons. These are all very big policy issues, but they need to be asked if the Open Movement really stands for reform and not just a further expansion and entrenchment of Neoliberalism. I’m using the term “Neoliberalism” because it resonates as a convenient label for describing how and why so many things seem to suck in Academia. Exploding student debt, vanishing job security, increasing compensation for top administrators, expanding bureaucracy and committee work, corporate management methodologies (Taylorism), and intensified competition for ever-shrinking public funding all fall under the general rubric of Neoliberalism. Neoliberal universities primarily serve the needs of commerce. They need to churn out technically skilled human resources (made desperate for any work by high loads of debt) and easily monetized technical advancements. This recent White House announcement about making universities “partner at the speed of business” could not be a clearer example of the Neoliberal mindset. It was written by Tom Kalil, one of the administration’s leading advocates for open science. The same White House that has embraced “open government,” “open science,” and “open data” has also ruthlessly fought whistle-blowers (Snowden), perpetuated ubiquitous surveillance (in conjunction with telecom and tech giants), hounded Aaron Swartz (my take here), and secretly negotiated the TPP, a far reaching expansion of intellectual property controls and punishments. All of these developments happened in a context of record corporate profits and exploding wealth inequality. And yes, I think these are all related trends. How can something so wonderful and right as “openness” further promote Neoliberalism? ... The problem is not that the Open Movement is wrong. The problem is that the need for reform goes far deeper than simply making papers and data available under CC-By or CC-Zero. Exploitative publishing regimes are symptomatic of larger problems in the distribution of wealth and power. The concentration of wealth that warps so much of our political and economic life will inevitably warp the Open Movement toward unintended and unwanted outcomes ..."