Open Science Comes Up Empty
A “major” study reveals little to no benefit, but fails to examine the harms
The Open Science Impact Pathways (PathOS) Project “was a Horizon Europe project that aimed to collect concrete evidence of Open Science effects.”
Reading between the lines, it’s clear they wanted to document what would certainly be the positive benefits of open science. Easy peasy, right?
The effort to look for these benefits took 18 people and cost €1,999,990 (US$2,345,466).
What did they find? Not much — unreliable artifacts of a potential citation benefit manifesting from an epistemic space distorted by the attention economy, and some evidence that citizen scientists are getting more information. Beyond that, according to reporting in Science:
. . . the multidisciplinary team . . . stressed it found little strong evidence that open science directly produced long-lasting and widespread effects on research or many economic and social benefits.
This passage in the Science coverage hit my laugh/cry line:
The PathOS research team was surprised not to find more proof that open content delivers measurable benefits, says Ioanna Grypari, the project’s coordinator and an economist at the Athena Research Center in Athens, Greece, which supports entrepreneurship. But the team concluded it is challenging to tease out whether making a scholarly article or data freely available produces a measurable influence on subsequent reuse and impact, separate from other factors such as the content’s quality.
While none of this is surprising to skeptics of blunt instrument, one-size-fits-all managerial approaches to changing complex, subtle, and multifaceted systems where a lot is at stake, a fundamental blindspot remains — that is, the group didn’t capture the macroscopic view of how the scientific and scholarly publishing world has been warped, distorted, and undermined by the drive to find a way to make the poorly defined movement labeled “open science” into something viable.
As has been the consistent case for advocates of “open” whatever, the group was looking for upside or benefit — couldn’t find them — while not looking for downsides or harms.
Downsides and harms are obvious to anyone looking at things carefully and skeptically, so allow me to enumerate a few: