If you are not paying for the product, you are the product? Panel discussion on the commodification of Open Research, Thursday, December 09, 2021, 4:30 pm CET on Zoom

Zoom link: https://hu-berlin.zoom.us/j/62737545043?pwd=TllnQkM4Qkw4VFhJWFVhZWI0V0pKZz09

Promoting transparency in the production and the sharing of knowledge across disciplinary cultures is a central goal of Open Research. It relies on the understanding that knowledge production should be transparent, open and collaborative in order to advance research quality. Open Access in particular holds up the principles that everything publicly funded must be open to the public. This claim is supposed to contradict the commercialization of science. But is this true?

Publishers have long since developed their own OA business models: on the one hand, fees apply for authors who want to publish open access, and on the other hand – as the German Research Foundation recently pointed out – data tracking has become a lucrative source of income: not only do publishers track behavior of researcher  online to improve their services  but they sell these data.This practice of surveillance could potentially lead to abuse of data and espionage as well as personal disrimination of researchers (cf. DFG 2021,4).Are users of unrestricted digital resources paying for this transformation with their data after all? 

By addressing these and further questions in a panel discussion, we would like to reflect critically on the achievements of the Open Research movement: How can knowledge and research be made transparent, open and accountable? How must Open Access or Open Research be designed to serve as an alternative to commercialized science? And how can researchers protect themselves from the surveillance of these large corporations? At the same time, we would like to sketch alternative scenarios aiming to realise practices of Open Science which are truly open.

With a recommendation on a state initiative „Open Research Berlin“, the Open Access Office Berlin initiates a process towards an open and participatory science that is also responsible for structural justice and inclusion. Wikimedia Deutschland has helped to further establish Open Science in Germany with its Open Science Fellows Program and will focus in the coming years on the question of the way research must open up in order to contribute to equitable science. The Open Access Office Berlin and Wikimedia Deutschland invite this panel to critically reflect on the state of openness in light of new business models and to outline alternative scenarios and models.

The Center for Open and Responsible Research (CORe) at Berlin University Alliance (BUA) and Deutsche Bibliotheksverband (dbv) support this event.