Is Open Science a Neo-Liberal Tool? Here’s why not. – .txtlab @ mcgill

"For Mirowski, open science advocates aim to solve four problems:

• science distrust
• a democratic deficit in science
• productivity slowdown
• rise of retractions / failure of replication

Not all of these problems are easy to even demonstrate, let alone fix. Public distrust in science is probably the most obvious and serious (witness climate change). But is science less “democratic” or “open” than it used to be? Instead of a productivity slowdown we could probably talk about a productivity boom, which as I’ll talk about is one of the problems open science is designed to address. There are so many more publications now than even fifty years ago. Finally, the rise of retractions is often seen as a sign that science is broken, or breaking. Then again, maybe rising retractions are a good thing in that we are doing a better job of tracking the reliability of each other’s work. Is open science contributing to more transparency, or is the marketization of science leading to more fraud? It’s hard to see how transparency isn’t the answer to the problem of fraud (see this example).

Mirowski’s real point though was that these claims are often used in order to further privatize science. What he was most convincing at showing was that there are forces out there that want to open science in order to monetize science, and in the process close portions of it back off again. Why do vested interests like Big Pharma or Taylor and Francis or Google like open science? Because then they can buy up portions of the IP chain and sell them to the public at a profit. Right now there is huge competition for who can monopolize the science pipeline (research gate, academia.edu, proquest, google scholar, facebook, twitter, zenodo, etc etc). Open science always seems to lead to closed science."