Italian project
Abstract
Open Science (OS) is an unfinished revolution.
In spite of a large consent on the benefits of OS in terms of progress of knowledge, innovation, pluralism, transparency and preservation, most scientific results are under the control of closed access publishing systems based on commercial databases protected by intellectual property (IP), contracts and technological protection measures. Moreover, the oligopolistic power of commercial publishers is stronger now than before the digital age. Probably, the main reason of the marginality of OS is the commodification of scientific and academic research in the last 40 years. Open science would require not only declarations, but also a framework of social and ethical norms, legal rules and technology,to which more attention should be paid.
Our project is focused on the link between publishing and open science, from an historical, philosophical and legal point of view, with a peculiar shift: the choice to emphasize the debate on old, new and future ways of publishing as interdisciplinary questions and the ambition to put the results of our debate to the test, by developing a J-C. Guédon's idea and by experimenting a new way of publishing - brachylogical, hyperlinked and interactive.
The free software movement - whose philosophical underpinnings deserve to be highlighted as well - shows that we would already be able to recognize authorship, to archive, to re-use and to comment our works and to produce different versions of them without constraining them into the article format. What would happen if a community of human and social scientists would try to publish short textual units, in a hypertextual environment in which they could be connected - physically and/or semantically - among them and even to longer units (e.g. primary sources, codes of law, secondary literature, raw and processed data) by means of hyperlinks?
To experiment such a post-journal we need an intellectual community sharing some common problems and questions, and relatively free from promotion concerns. The ideal candidates are scholars, like the participants in our project, who are open access advocates as well and who share a couple of questions:
- what formal and informal rules in terms of IP and research assessment would make the proposed new model of scientific
communication conceivable? We need a model that understands the opening of science not only as a way of free accessing and reusing its results, but also as a transparent and pluralist communication system, in dialogue with the society and yet independent of both public and private sectors.
- could the German debate (1773-1794) on the unauthorized reprinting of books and on the impact of technology on
science communication help us to understand to connection between research and communication technology? The very debate about them could be the first object of our "experimentum pericolosum" in publishing: OS, to become more than a word, has to be build in the open.