'The future(s) of open science' by Philip Mirowski in (2018) 48(2) Social Studies of Science comments
Almost everyone is enthusiastic that ‘open science’ is the wave of the future. Yet when one looks seriously at the flaws in modern science that the movement proposes to remedy, the prospect for improvement in at least four areas are unimpressive. This suggests that the agenda is effectively to re-engineer science along the lines of platform capitalism, under the misleading banner of opening up science to the masses. We live in an era of trepidation over the future of science. It is all the more noteworthy, then, that science policy circles have embraced an open infatuation with ‘open science’. The whole thing kicked off in the later 2000s, with rumors concerning something called ‘Science 2.0’. In January 2012, the New York Times (Lin, 2012) then had the good sense to promote the rebranding of this imaginary as ‘open science’. The British Royal Society intervened close on its heels in 2012, with a public relations document entitled Science as an Open Enterprise (Royal Society, 2012). Subsequently, this was rapidly followed by popularizing books (Nielsen, 2012; Weinberger, 2012) and a plethora of government white papers, policy documents and articles (e.g. OECD, 2015; CNRS, 2016; Strasser and Edwards, 2015; Vuorikari and Punie, 2015; Weinberger, 2012). All sorts of institutes and think tanks (the Ronin Institute, Center for Open Science, openscienceASAP, UK Open Data Institute, PCORI, Laura and John Arnold Foundation) sprouted across the landscape, dedicated to propounding the virtues of open science for all and sundry. The NIH even teamed up with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to offer a much ballyhooed ‘Open Science Prize’ consisting of six awards to various teams of the not-very-princely sum of $80K with which to launch (?) their prototypes. The concept was trundled out to the public in the format of a 2017 PBS television Series ‘The Crowd and the Cloud’, funded by the NSF. Congressional mandates stipulating ‘openness’ were hidden in the US ‘Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act’, itself folded into the 2016 ‘American Competitiveness and Innovation Act’.
Back in Europe in 2013, the G8 Science Ministers formally endorsed a policy of encouraging open science. In May 2016 the EU Competitiveness Council issued a mission statement that all scientific articles should be ‘freely accessible’ by 2020 (Enserink, 2016). ‘The time for talking about Open Access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice’, the Dutch state secretary for education, culture, and science, Sander Dekker, added in a statement. Lord knows, the last thing an EU bureaucrat has patience with is talking about something not at all well understood. This, in turn, led to a programmatic ‘Vision for Europe’ in 2016 of ‘Open Innovation, Open Science’. The taken-for-granted premise that modern science is in crying need of top-to-bottom restructuring and reform turns out to be one of the more telling aspects of this unseemly scrum, a melee to be in the vanguard of prying science ‘open’. But the language is deceptive: In what sense was science actually ever ‘closed’, and who precisely is so intent upon cracking it open now? Where did all the funding come from to turn this vague and ill-specified opinion into a movement?
To even pose these questions in a sober and deliberate manner, while making direct reference to the actual history of science, constitutes a challenge to the prophets of openness, because it conflicts with their widespread tendency to treat the last three or more centuries of science as operating in essentially the same monolithic modality. The so-called ‘scientific method’, once it appeared, persisted relatively unchanged, or so goes the undergraduate version of Western Civ. To evade the admission that scientific research and dissemination might actually have been structured differently across diverse epochs and geographical eras, the prophets of openness instead rapidly pivot to a completely unsupported theory of technological determinism to motivate their quest. Change is inevitable, they preach, due to some obscure imperatives concerning the computer and the internet and social media. Once scientists acquiesce to the implacable imperatives of the information revolution, it is said, they will discover that science itself should necessarily become more ‘open’, and the whole society will naturally benefit.
The layers of confusion surrounding open science rival a millefeuille, and can be just as sticky. The quickest way to cut through the confection is to acknowledge that science has been constituted by a sequence of historical regimes of epistemic and logistical organization, long before the current craze for ‘openness’; this proposition could be perhaps patterned after the arguments made in what has been called the literature on ‘historical epistemology’ (e.g. Daston, 1994; Hacking, 1992). Much of this literature tends to make its case in the format of what used to be called ‘stage theories’: descriptions of historical sequences of relatively internally coherent modes, hegemonies or regimes, structured according to certain key self-images and practices, and punctuated by periods of instability and transition. Indeed, I shall argue that the open science movement is an artifact of the current neoliberal regime of science, one that reconfigures both the institutions and the nature of knowledge so as to better conform to market imperatives.
But before that, it is necessary to take note of the slippery connotations and motives behind the open science movement. For some, it denotes mere open access to existing scientific publications; for others, it portends a different format for future scientific publication; for yet others, it signifies the open provision of scientific data; for others, it is primarily about something like open peer review; and for still others, the clamor for openness purports to welcome the participation of non-scientists into the research process, under the rubric of citizen science. Of course, these are individually wildly disparate phenomena; but it is noteworthy that many of the proponents and cheerleaders glide rather effortlessly between these diverse conceptions, and that in itself provides a clue to the deep structure of the emergent world of open science. Each ‘reform’ might accidentally have been deemed the imperative of the ‘same’ technological development or, conversely, they might each exemplify a more profound shift in epistemology. Thus, rather than track each of the above sub-components individually, I will approach the problem of understanding open science from the broader perspective of asking: What sort of thing is it that open science proposes to fix about older science?
Mody (2011) writes that if an ‘epochal break has any features worth studying, they should be visible, in some way, down at the microlevel of practice’ (p. 64). I agree with this precept. The way to make the case for a structural break in the nature of modern science is to link some broad abstract cultural ideas about knowledge to pronounced transformations of scientific practice at the microlevel. The primary manifestations of the new regime are the marriage of an ethos of what has been called ‘radically collaborative science’ with the emergent structures of ‘platform capitalism’, all blessed under the neoliberal catechism of the market as super information processor. The ultimate objective of this paper is to describe how this marriage works; but it turns out to be more informative to begin by surveying the infirmities of recent science that the open science advocates claim they can fix.
