The contested field of Open Science: a debate through the lens of inclusion

The Open Science (OS) movement has evolved in the last decades, with different actors taking different paths across the various dimensions of the OS concept. Contradictory implementation plans for open access and disparate visions of citizen science co-exist, and are often in conflict at the global scale. The tensions between these opposite visions are not only determined by the degree of openness/closedness but also related to the degree of inclusiveness/exclusiveness, as shown in Figure 1.

The concern for this issue was boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In making up the balance of 20 years since the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), it is pretty clear that open access was born with a noble intention, but has evolved as a flawed reality. Vested interests within the academic publishing sector, particularly publishers of high-impact journals, had a great incentive to change their funding model to hybrid. Their costly subscriptions remain, and their manuscript submissions continue apace.

A drift of journals born in Open Access or mega-journals demanding increasingly high payments for Article Processing Charges (APC) has overshadowed the achievements of the Open Access movement. In this context, the challenges of OS are different in the North and the South, but also in the West and the East, given the asymmetrical resources and development within each region.

A key concern is how to expand scientific openness while fostering diversity and interculturality. OS represents a new mode of doing science based on cooperative work and new ways of sharing knowledge, often through digital technologies or other collaborative tools. Also, as expressed in UNESCO Recommendation in 2021, there is the hope that OS will 'serve to widen access to scientific knowledge for the benefit of science and society and (…) promote opportunities for innovation and participation in the creation of scientific knowledge and the sharing of its benefits' (UNESCO, 2023).

A recent dossier by Global Dialogue discusses the aspirations of inclusion in OS against worrying trends, with contributions by Fernanda Beigel, Eunjung Shin and Jae-Mahn Shim, Ana María Cetto, Sarita Albagli and Ismael Rafols. The overall picture is that, yes, OS is spreading, but doing so in such a way that questions the expectations that it will lead to more equity and improve the societal contributions of science. In this blog post, we review this debate.

Growing pains: more Open Science is exacerbating its contradictions

Our view is that something seems to have gone terribly wrong with the current modes of developing OS: (1) the current OS is leading to more inequity and (2) the societal impact of the current ways of doing OS is unclear or limited. First, researchers in rich countries now have the privilege to be relatively more visible than colleagues in poor-resource contexts because our institutions can pay expensive fees to publish in Open Access. This goes against the basic principle that scientific contributions should be judged and made visible according to their scholarly merits, not because of the wealth of authors. Therefore, many stakeholders believe that the pay-to-publish model (what used to be called 'gold' or hybrid OS) is corrupting the research system.

This model is also undermining publishers with 'diamond' Open Access (free to publish, free to read), particularly in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe. As a result, even in Western Europe, the tide is shifting from pay-to-publish to institutional support for diamond OA journals.

Second, there is yet little understanding of the societal benefits of OS, according to a recent review. Current evidence suggests that citizen science and participatory approaches with policy and stakeholders are the main means through which research contributes to social arenas. In other words, social impact seldom happens only via papers or data, but mainly through social interactions that mediate the 'translation' of knowledge back and forth between societal actors and researchers. These findings question the narrow focus of current OS investment in technological platforms of many OS policies.

The stakeholders in the dynamics of inclusive/exclusive Open Science

A path to inclusive openness deals with two structural obstacles, one dependent on material resources and the other on the symbolic capital at stake in scientific practice. The first obstacle is the global inequalities and the risks of extraction that openness creates for non-hegemonic research communities lacking the infrastructures for visibility and recognition.

The second emerges from the increasing struggles between commercialisation and decommercialisation of scholarly publishing and scientific information. These conflicts go beyond the tension of diamond versus gold routes, given that the recognition and rewards of scientists were built under an "excellence" regime supported by commercial publishers. Accordingly, the feasibility of a real change is ultimately linked to addressing asymmetries caused by many factors.

Latin America presents an alternative open-access publishing circuit, with diamond journals that are community-managed and driven by the principle of science as a common good. However, internationalised researchers under the performative effects of high-impact journals still hold the belief that "mainstream" circuit concentrates "excellence", which prevents them from changing their paths of circulation at risk of losing recognition.

Platforms that show Latin American journals like SciELO, Redalyc and Latindex have made enormous efforts to increase visibility and impact. Although governmental agencies and public institutions sustain these regional platforms, which constitute the regional knowledge circuits, the academic evaluation defined by these same organisations looks down on these journals.

This inclusiveness faces the opposition of the oligopoly of commercial stakeholders that seek profits and centralised infrastructures under closed ecosystems. Meanwhile, genuinely open infrastructures that comply with the FAIR principles, such as OpenAlex, guarantee visibility but are limited in terms of inclusiveness by the availability of persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as DOI, ORCID, or others. Inclusiveness is related to interculturality in science, which is highly associated with multilingualism. However, some inclusive publishing platforms have limitations in terms of the availability of metadata. The lack of PIDs, for example, diminishes the circulation of this production through indexing services or search engines. Autonomous governance may collide with unrestricted openness as we move to full compliance with the CARE principles, which aim at the inclusiveness of subaltern groups and the protection of indigenous knowledge. Digital sovereignty may, on its part, imply certain degrees of closedness.

Contextualising openness: from 'access to outputs' to 'connections'

The Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet) led by Leslie Chan, made the case that openness needs to be contextualised, as shown in Figure 2. This contextualisation cannot be achieved simply by focusing on making the products of research digitally accessible. Instead, as Sabina Leonelli has argued in a recent book, the focus should be on the processes of knowledge exchange between the researchers and social communities. These processes may benefit from open access, but the particular forms and platforms used will greatly vary depending on the particular process of knowledge exchange and the social stakeholders involved.

The movement for OS has held promises of epistemic justice. Many activists have the impression that current developments have been hijacked by private actors, mainly oligopolistic publishers, but perhaps also infrastructures in powerful scientific institutions. To regain its emancipatory power and care for equity and inclusion, OS needs to redefine itself, not in terms of products and technological platforms but in the processes of knowledge exchange across a much wider range of human communities.

All these tensions in OS occur while scholarly publishing is quickly changing. The expansion of mega-journals, the growth of predatory publishing and the pledge for fast-track peer review blur the traditional interaction between a scholarly community and the audience of a journal. The homogenisation and automatisation of editorial management displace editors from key decisions. A crisis of legitimacy emerges from the effects of commercial open access, and this deepens asymmetries but also places us in front of a potential opportunity.

If any radical change is possible, it shall come through a strong critique of the concept of "excellence" in the ongoing reforms towards contextualised, diverse and situated research assessment, such as FOLEC and CoARA. Indeed, to seek inclusive openness entails new definitions of research quality, framed in terms of interactions in a multilingual horizon of science as an intercultural common good.

This blog post draws on the articles The Contested Field of Openness and Inclusion by Fernanda Beigel and Rethinking Open Science: Towards Care for Equity and Inclusion by Ismael Rafols, published in the journal Global Dialogue of the International Association of Sociology.

Header image by UNESCO.