The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science sets out an ambitious vision for transforming research towards making science a global public good. In addition to continued support for the increased openness of research products (publications, data, software), this document foregrounds the transformative potential of open research practices to enhance equity and inclusiveness within global research. To this end, the UNESCO Recommendation explicitly identifies engagement with societal actors and dialogue with other knowledge systems as key pillars for Open Science.

Operationalising this vision for Open Science will not be easy. It will require developing and maintaining new tools and practices to support the expanded engagement of diverse actors in the global research system. It will also require targeted investment and different ways of monitoring Open Science beyond simply counting open research products to assess impact more broadly. By directing the gaze towards these issues, the Recommendation exposes the fault lines of the current global research ecosystem and invites a critical reevaluation of Open Science. Discussions in these areas are already underway, but are they enough to truly embed equity into Open Science?

EASST/4S conference session

Motivated by these concerns, we convened four sessions on critical Open Science scholarship at the 2024 EASST/4S conference, a joint meeting of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). From diverse disciplinary backgrounds in STS, history, philosophy and sociology of science, the contributors offered a rich range of case studies foregrounding the deep-seated and longstanding problems with global research systems and knowledge creation.

The first group of contributors addressed the complexities of open research and data infrastructures. With a focus on biodiversity, Lotte Asveld and Bob Kreiken examined knowledge norms and practices that are privileged in genomic databases and the marginalisation of indigenous and scientific perspectives from the Global South. Sarah Davies tackled the issue of epistemic justice in biocuration, emphasising the importance of the often undervalued work of curators in global research infrastructures as knowledge creators. Kathryne Metcalf analysed a recent replication controversy illustrating conflicting epistemic values across research communities that use large microbiome data resources in the United States. Lastly, Fotis Tsiroukis suggested a framework to map the challenges of interdisciplinary coordination in agricultural science in Greece, highlighting the epistemic value of humbleness in enabling complementarity between research practices.

The second group of contributors explored the tensions of data production in domains with competing interests. Mariana Pitta Lima and Bethania Almeida presented the work of CIDACS linking social and health administrative data from low-income populations in Brazil. They addressed the challenge of bringing together data providers, regulators, managers, and national and international collaborators. Nicole Foti examined the calls for open research in drug development and the structural barriers to its full deployment as a problem of collective action. Finally, Bennett McIntosh discussed the ethical intricacies of data repurposing in the domain of social genomics considering individual privacy, intellectual property, and equity, as well as the overall status of this ‘unfielded’ field of studies.

The third group of contributors tackled the challenges of participatory research. In the context of agricultural research in Ghana, Joyce Koranteng-Acquah discussed the limitations of farmers’ involvement in their interaction with scientists. Presenting her work on home-focused studies about water usage and storage in informal settlements in Colombia, Tatiana Acevedo-Guerrero advocated for the inclusion of compensation and formal labour contracts for community participants. Louise Bezuidenhout presented her findings on the persistence of barriers to open digital resources for users outside of Western academic traditions. She highlighted how the design of existing research infrastructures continued to perpetuate these marginalisations.

The Submarine Cable Map is an example of free open digital resource available. Source.

Finally, the last group discussed avenues to support change. Ludovica Paseri argued for the need to differentiate between Open Science as democratisation, institutional response and pluralism in policy settings. Gustaf Nelhans discussed the need to explore alternative publishing routes given that the scientific community is not always in control of the current publishing system; and Ismael Ràfols indicated that, given the fact that Open Science entails a change in the whole research system, its monitoring will require not only new indicators, but an entirely different approach to monitoring.

The four paper sessions were rounded off by a panel discussion session around the issue of monitoring equitable open science practices, triggered by an open UNESCO Consultation on OS Monitoring. The starting point was the acknowledgement that in the recent efforts to monitor Open Science globally and ensure comparability across contexts, equity and inclusion are mentioned but in a peripheral or circumscribed manner. The main focus of these monitoring initiatives is currently on the outputs of research (publications, data, software, etc.) that are accessible from digital platforms. Without denying that these outputs must be taken into consideration, there are other crucial dimensions – and potential markers of systemic change – that are overlooked, which are those that precisely speak to problems of inequity. As contributors to the panels pointed out, the issue of the conceptualisation of open science and its monitoring is at the core of the challenges of implementing Open Science. The question is: how to monitor their enactment?

Then, the discussion centred on the problematic focus on what, in principle, seems ‘easier to measure’ (e.g. numbers on datasets, code, pre-registered studies, open access publications, etc.). Focusing on these outputs, some argued, can become a form of ‘virtue’ display that relies on the aggregate level and creates a situation where communities with limited resources, and thus the capacity to share and reuse data, are not included. At the same time, they might be less inclined to share their data, leading to more inequities and even reinforcing hierarchical structures and increasing accumulated advantages. Moving away from a metrics-focused approach to monitoring, however, requires new tools and resources. The development of these resources will pose its own challenges concerning perpetuating or introducing marginalisations into our understanding of global Open Science.

Take-away messages

The rich and diverse scholarship presented at the EASST/4S sessions raises a significant challenge to the Open Science community. It highlights that without a detailed examination of the complexities of diverse social and epistemic domains and significant systemic change within global research, the transformative aspects of the Recommendation vision for Open Science will remain unrealised. Similarly, the adaptations to existing monitoring strategies that count research outputs are unlikely to suffice in capturing this transformative potential. Instead, further critical scholarship is needed to identify research cultures, infrastructures, and practices already embedded within global research that require an overhaul. Without this critical scholarship and engagement, global scholarship will likely continue to perpetuate unequal systems and practices that do not embrace this comprehensive view of global knowledge creation.

The EASST/4S conference sessions were co-organised and co-sponsored by the PHIL_OS ERC project: A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments and the UNESCO Chair in Diversity and Inclusion in Global Science.