Italian project
Open science and its codes: putting an unfinished revolution to the test
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.
State of the art
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 part of scientific results is under the control of traditional closed access publishing systems based on commercial databases protected by intellectual property (IP), contracts and technological protection measures [Björk B.C. (2013) Open Access—Are the Barriers to Change Receding?, Publications 1, 2013, no. 1: 5-15, http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/1/1/5].
Moreover, the oligopolistic power of commercial publishers is now stronger than before the digital age [Larivière V., Haustein S., Mongeon P. (2015) The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502]. Why? Probably the main reason of the marginality of OS is the commodification of scientific and academic research in the last forty years [Radder H. (ed.) (2010) The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University, Pittsburgh Pa., University of Pittsburgh Press].
Shaping the scientific and academic research on the market logic has in fact many side effects. Among the most significant ones, there is the idea that competition is a value in itself. For example, the “publish or perish” logic strengthened by bibliometric research assessment systems forces scientists to change their mentality. According to this logic, publications are not anymore the expression of a critical thinking but mere “products” [Pievatolo M.C. (2015) Publishing without perishing. Are there such things as “research products”? In: Aisa 1st annual conference - Nostra res agitur: open science as a social question, 22-23 ottobre 2015, Pisa, http://archiviomarini.sp.unipi.it/644/; Pievatolo, M.C. (2011) I. Kant, Sette scritti politici liberi, Firenze U.P., Introduzione http://btfp.sp.unipi.it/dida/kant_7/index.xhtml#introduzionegenerale; Pievatolo M.C.
(2014), Il Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica: la via dell'overlay journal. Bibliotime, 17/3 http://archiviomarini.sp.unipi.it/602/]. Unsurprisingly, this kind of competitive science reflects a strong system of power affecting referees, editorial boards, learned societies, commercial publishers and bibliometric databases providers (e.g. Thomson-Reuters - the former ISI - Web of Science and Scopus), universities and national agencies for quality assurance in higher education.
Nevertheless, it has to be reminded that science is not only competition: it is also a cooperative game. OS is essentially based on a cooperative action. In particular, OS Mertonian norm of “communism” is embedded in the digital technology. For example, institutional and disciplinary OA repositories based on a common interoperability standard (Open Access Initiative-Public Metadata Harvesting) are among best outcomes of the interaction between Mertonian social norm of communism and technology [see also Hess C. Ostrom E. (2007),Understanding knowledge as a commons: from theory to practice, MIT Press].
Until now OS has been driven by a bottom-up approach based on technological infrastructures and solemn declarations such as the Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin declarations, but more recently we are facing a new top-down approach based on legislative tools [Caso R. (2013) La legge italiana sull'accesso aperto agli articoli scientifici: prime note comparatistiche, Il diritto dell’informazione e dell’informatica 2013, n. 4/2013, p. 681-702; Pascuzzi G, Caso R. (2010). Il diritto d'autore dell'era digitale. In: Pascuzzi G. Il diritto dell'era digitale. pp. 199--249, Bologna, Italia: Società Editrice Il Mulino].
If we believe in the uprising of open science we should pay more attention to the interaction among social and ethical norms,legal rules and technology. Without a new approach centered on cooperation, OS will remain an unfinished revolution [Brembs B., Poynder R. (2014), Richard Poynder on the state of open access: Where are we? What still needs to be done? (interview published on 21st March 2014) http://poynder.blogspot.ca/2014/03/the-state-of-open-access.html See also Pievatolo, M.C. (2014), Richard Poynder: lo stato dell’accesso aperto, "Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica" http://btfp.sp.unipi.it/?p=4417]. As K.Fitzpatrick wrote in her unusual book [Fitzpatrick K. (2011), Planned Obsolescence. Publishing, Technology and the Future of Academy, New York, NYU Press http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/ See also Pievatolo, M.C. (2012), L'accademia dei morti viventi, "Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica" http://btfp.sp.unipi.it/?p=1033], our major danger is to continue to repeat practices that, although both technologically and economically meaningful in the age of the printing press, are now keeping us back in a kind of academy of the undead.