Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Mark Huskisson. Mark is the Co-Chair of the Assembly of the Commons for the European Research Infrastructure, OPERAS, and strategic adviser to PKP | Public Knowledge Project. He is an independent consultant, speaker, and contractor at The Husk Agency.

This is the second article of three in a guest series reflecting on the main themes and ideas gathered and discussed at The Munin Conference at the end of 2024. An annual publishing conference located at the University of the Arctic which aims to gather thinking and thought from around the world of publishing for discussion and debate. The conference is named after Munin, one of Odin’s ravens, sent out each day to gather knowledge from around the world and the event lives up to the spirit of this idea with a vibrant knowledge-gathering program. Part One, looking at Bibliodiversity, is available here.

In Part One of this series, we reflected on the rise of the use of the term “bibliodiversity” in the publishing industry and its rapid increase in use by global policymakers. We looked at what constitutes bibliodiversity and why there are increasing calls for a healthier diversity in scholarly communications to resolve critical data gaps in global knowledge. 

Many see the push for Open Science as a way to deliver greater diversity in the scholarly communications ecosystem, providing the opportunity for greater participation and contribution to knowledge creation, as one of many benefits. But what is being asked for and what evidence is there that applying open science delivers what it promises? [NB: I use one established definition of science here to represent the established and continued pursuit of all knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world, not just STEM subjects.]

Open science is not a new term, it is constantly referenced and increasingly applied as a core tenet or requirement of multiple policies and recommendations issued by, amongst others, the European Commission and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Science Europe, the steward of €25bn in annual funding, states that pursuing open science “will improve the capacity of science in addressing societal and global challenges.”

Protagonists for open science ask that science be made increasingly more accessible, inclusive, and transparent. Advocates wish to shift the culture to increase cooperation and transparency in all stages of research by sharing data, publications, software, tools, and results as early and openly as possible. 

The increased transparency allied to an ongoing healthy skepticism and scrutiny of research in open workflows is seen as key to helping expose questionable research practices. Supporters of the shift to more open science believe that this will improve the integrity of scholarly output and the trustworthiness of science and scholarly publications. 

Therefore, the common assumption among advocates is that open science will perform better than the current system of reporting and disseminating science. Or, to borrow Jon Tennant’s line, Open Science is just science done right – the idea that we do science to fundamentally improve people’s health and quality of life and the shift to open science will help to produce good science, not just more science.

UNESCO’s Increasing Action on Open Science

Many agencies and institutions recognize the critical need to restore people’s trust in science and to return it to the heart of policy and decision-making processes. The dire state of disconnect was seen in a recent Nature survey found that the systems that connect scientists with politicians are not working well with 70% of science-advice specialists saying that governments do not routinely use their advice.

UNESCO’s actions and recommendations identify the need to make science more responsive to societal needs and aim to accelerate the production and use of actionable knowledge. All are underpinned by the Declaration of Human Rights where Article 15 enshrines the right to “enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications” while Article 27 stresses that everyone has the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” 

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science makes “sure [that] not only that scientific knowledge is accessible but also that the production of that knowledge itself is inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.” It is about equitability in the creation of knowledge and the desire to democratize science. 

This will mean facing up to the longstanding challenge of bridging science and society – how the public can engage with, access, and benefit from scientific data and advancements. This includes addressing the critical issue of unequal access to science, technology, and innovation, including a focus on marginalized groups and how indigenous knowledge can drive new research for both the local and global good.

The loss of trust in science and its publications is a critical issue as we begin 2025. Csaba Kőrösi (President of the General Assembly at the UN) highlighted his concern in his opening statement at the 2023 UN Open Science Conference “Fostering a culture of open research and access is critical for the democratization of knowledge. As things currently stand, grossly inaccurate misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation are freely available online, but credible, authoritative and peer-reviewed scientific advances are guarded by paywalls.”

The transparency of open science is viewed as key to restoring this trust. Research infrastructures such as OPERAS (full disclosure: I am Co-Chair of the Assembly of the Commons) are dedicated to open scholarly communication. Where constructing a more resilient and equitable ecosystem is seen as vital in the fight against the proliferation of false and misleading information and the massive rise in disinformation that continues to undermine public trust and democratic processes. OPERAS recently released the Fostering Trust in the Digital Age report as a contribution to the global dialogue on nurturing trust in the digital age.

More broadly, in an attempt to address the slow progress in the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), UNESCO has launched the International Decade of Science for Sustainable Development looking to harness the power of all sciences to advance sustainable change in society, the economy, and the environment. 

And, finally, the year ended with the third Open Science in the South Conference on “African Scientific Publishing We Want” and the second Global Summit on Diamond Open Access on “Centering social justice in scholarly communication to advance research as a public good.” Coalescing advocates for open science and the proponents of Diamond Open Access (where readers do not pay for access and authors are not charged for publication) in Cape Town as allies in the creation of pathways for inclusive and equitable participation in the scholarly publishing ecosystem.

What We Know About the Impact of Open Science

All the energy and momentum behind these recommendations and actions are based on the belief that open science is a force for good in science and society. But as research into open science is uneven and patchy, we know little about its impact and efficacy. The Horizon Europe-funded PathOS project is dedicated to reducing this gap in understanding by gathering evidence on the effects of open science to better understand and measure its impacts and their causal mechanisms.

In Tony Ross-Hellauer’s Munin talk “What We Know About Open Science”, he made use of the Streetlight Effect illustration as a way of recognizing the difficulty of identifying impact. Research has focused on areas where data is available, rather than where evidence is most needed. Or, as Noam Chomsky put it, “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.”

Beginning to illuminate the dark side of the street, the initial findings of PathOS indicate that open science has demonstrable societal benefits, with a notable impact on public education and awareness, promoting a greater level of societal involvement in research activities, and decision-making processes. In academia, open access publishing tends to receive more citations, enhancing the visibility and reach of research with the potential for accelerating scientific discovery [full results can be found at Cole et al. (2024) and Klebel et al. (2024)].

In the Munin keynote, “Human-centric Open Science”, the philosopher Sabina Leonelli argued that there needs to be a reframing of openness to better support epistemic diversity in scientific research. Current policies that drive open access, reduced to its most basic form as a business model, are little more than the ‘sharing’ of Western information to the rest of the world and become, to some extent, an obstacle to epistemic diversity, in turn, subduing bibliodiversity and exacerbating existing epistemic injustice within the academy, publishing industry, and society. 

The ‘way we do science’ – the way we frame it, understand it, weigh it, discuss it, index it, discover it, reward it, and value it – is hard baked into our system and deeply embedded in our monolithic globalized digital platforms. Leonelli argues that open science demands a more engaged and contextual model for nurturing the quality and inclusivity of research through “judicious connections among systems of practice.”

Proponents stress that open science is not the goal in itself; it is about enabling a cultural shift in academia and scholarly communications that both make scientific knowledge accessible and the production of that knowledge inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and reusable for everyone. 

But the culture of the publishing industry and academia is remarkably resilient to change. Way back in 1981, Philip Altbach introduced the center-periphery concept. In this he identified Western universities and that, “The apparatus of knowledge access and distribution is concentrated at the center … Major publishers of scientific materials, the prestigious academic journals, and the like are predominantly located at the centers.” The centers being the geographical locations of the major universities and publishing houses of the twentieth century. The researchers and their universities on the periphery were seen to be disadvantaged in the international knowledge network.

These centers themselves have shifted in influence and size with global geopolitical changes in the intervening decades, particularly with the increased commercialization of the industry, the growth in influence of Chinese research, and the move to electronic forms of production and digital publishing. What initially offered a promise for what Altbach suggested could be a “new international order predicated on a more equitable international system,” has led to a far greater entrenchment of the established order. The digitalization, globalization, and commodification of research processes have allowed for a greater, more efficient enforcement of economic models, barriers to entry, and benefits of scale.

In her book Philosophy of Open Science, Leonelli argues that the ‘just sharing’ of models like open access risks further ‘centering’ knowledge and entrenching epistemic injustice. Open science contributes to the decentering of the epistemic bias that is deeply entrenched in the global production and dissemination of knowledge.

Reflecting on his research Altbach observed that “The inequalities of the international knowledge system run very deep, have strong institutional support and significant historical roots, and are often in the interests of those who wield power … especially when those in the industrialized nations, who hold power, have shown little inclination to yield it in the past.” 

This early conceptualization of a ‘knowledge industrial complex’ appears to only have been strengthened in the past forty years. This is what proponents of open science aim to address, the worsening of this situation and not ‘just sharing‘ through open access but building the capacity for contextual models to nurture the quality and inclusivity of research and its publishing outcomes to foster bibliodiversity and develop the societal impact of science through the publishing of its research. 

This includes the call to change evaluation metrics to prioritize societal impact so we can address real world issues and improve science for society. But are there measures we can use and is there enough evidence to push for open science through open access, open data, and open infrastructure in the publishing industry, or is what we currently have ‘good enough’? As critics of the ‘Open Movement’ ask, is the pursuit of perfect the enemy of the good that is already available to us all? Is this constant and single-minded pursuit of Open getting in the way of improving what we already have? 

In the next post in this series, I will reflect on the early search for evidence of impact from open science in practice. Are there signs that open science works in the real world? To the benefit of society as per the role of ‘doing science’? Can we start to identify evidence of the societal impact of Open?