Åpen vitenskap og politikk

Åpen vitenskap er politikk, men er det høyrepolitikk eller kommunisme? Benedikt Fecher og Gert G. Wagner skriver om to ytterpunkter, Jeffrey Beall som mener at åpen vitenskap er anti-kapitalistisk, mens Philip Mirowski påstår åpen vitenskap følger nyliberalistisk markedslogikk. Jeg tror begge har litt rett, men at de bommer ved at de ikke ser at åpen vitenskap kommer fra åpen kildekodemiljøet, og åpen kildekodemiljøet hentet sin inspirasjon fra vitenskapen. Det har jeg skrevet om her og her. Fecher og Wagner skriver i artikkelen "Open Access, Innovation, and Research Infrastructure"

The historian Philip Mirowski consequently sees a neoliberal project in the overall developmentof open access [27]. Jeffrey Beall, the initiator of Beall’s list of “predatory” open access publishing, evencompares the real OA movement to anti-corporatism and calls for a collectivization of production andan organization of scholarly knowledge solely within academia [28].One does not have to go as far as to describe the development in scholarly publishing as a purelyneoliberal project or even call for expropriation. What is true, however, is that commercial players(again) occupy many critical nodes in the digital information infrastructure and that the businessmodel and licensing bias in the current OA endeavors entails the risk of reproducing the dependenceon the same commercial players.

James Porter utdyper dette med kommersialisering og akademia mer i artikkelen "Markets Bad, Academia Good? Review of Philip Mirowski's Science Mart".

Lost in translation, Mirowski decries, are the historically complex interrelation between science and industry. A knee`jerk  reaction is to immediately claim that scientists and their institutions have always been compelled to ‘sing the prince’s tune when taking the prince’s coin’ (page 89).

Nå ser jeg at de to gründerne i Microsoft, Paul G. Allen og Bill Gates har gått helt over til "fienden" som de for noen år siden karakteriserte som "kreft" på samfunnet. Begge to går helt inn for Creative Commons BY, og begge to går for fullt inn i åpen vitenskap. Bare se på disse nylige sidene til Paul G. Allen Institute  og Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Allen Institute is dedicated to answering some of the biggest questions in bioscience and accelerating research worldwide. The Institute is a recognized leader in large-scale research with a commitment to an open science model within its research institutes, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and the Allen Institute for Cell Science.

Chief Operating Officer i Gates Foundation skriver:

Here at the Gates Foundation, we strongly believe in the potential of the open access model. We have made a significant investment to ensure that all of our peer-reviewed published research is published on full open access terms. Effective January 1, 2017, support for open access publishing is built into every grant made by the Gates Foundation, across all program areas.

Of course, we’re aware that the broad implementation of open access — which will require new ways of financing publishing fees and some crucial changes to academic norms — is not as straightforward as it may seem. 

Flere og flere universiteter og vitenskapelige selskaper mener at åpen vitenskap er til deres eget beste. Nå sist den tyske psykologiske foreningen.