The open science project in an unequal world

Abstract

UNESCO's Open Science Recommendation, approved last November, proposes to promote a global consensus on its values and actions. The pillars of openness proposed by this project are: open scientific infrastructures, dialogue with different knowledge systems, as well as engagement with different social sectors, namely citizen and participatory science. The five main manifestations of open science are: open access to scientific publications, open access to research data, open educational resources, open software and hardware. However, in order to create an enabling policy environment for open science, the Recommendation calls for the promotion of responsible research evaluation practices that encourage quality science, recognising the diversity of results and stimulating the different missions of the university. Promoting a culture of open science is a complex task that requires integrated information systems to understand, promote and evaluate the universe of research outputs and activities. For this reason, one of the main concerns raised in this Recommendation is that, even with its good intentions, open science could widen the gap between technologically advanced countries and poorer countries with precarious digital infrastructure. Thus, the unilateral growth of open science platforms in dominant countries would not only increase inequalities in access to science, but also enable different forms of exaction of data or commercial use of the efforts made in the periphery. The dominant role played by English as interoperable code also increases the existing asymmetries, putting at risk multillingualism and bibliodiversity that are critical for the equitable advancement of science.

The Open Science movement emerged from the scientific community and has spread rapidly throughout the different nations, demanding the opening of the doors of knowledge. Academics, publishers, librarians, students, officials and citizens are joining this call. In this work we analyze the progress in terms of open access in non-hegemonic countries, as well as its obstacles and asymmetries. In Latin America, progress has been made in collaborative infrastructures, digitization processes, repositories, editorial professionalization, national regulations and other forms of government support. But these advances contrast with a very incipient incidence of the incentives for open access publication and even less for open access to research data in the systems of categorization and promotion of researchers. The same occurs with project financing instruments, even in countries with a national open access law, where it is observed that the impact factor of publications continues to define successful projects and there are practically no evaluation criteria that weight open science. At tenure and categorization systems for researchers, there is still a predominance of global criteria of excellence and university rankings, which reveals a sort of alienation between government efforts at the service of non-commercial open access and the evaluation systems still anchored in the laws of the prestige industry created by the publishing oligopolies. This also explains that despite the regional development of indexing systems that guarantee the academic quality of the published production, Latin American journals, the vast majority of which are diamond access, still encounter many difficulties in gaining legitimacy in the academic community.

The paper addresses the vital importance to advance in the integration of information systems and repositories in CRIS systems, delving on the particular relevance of the Norwegian model, to promote the shift towards a comprehensive evaluation. These services are the unique mean to includes all local scientific production, in all languages and formats, while rewarding open science practices. The pilot experiences of Brazil and Peru analyzed in this paper shows that compared to institutional CRIS, the national CRIS have a great starting complexity, but they foster a true integration of all the universities and organizations. And for those institutions that develop an institutional CRIS with software and interoperable links in the public domain, they will be able to integrate decisively to strengthen these national scientific information systems and will use its benefits for their own needs. The fact that the Latin American CRIS pilot projects are national and not institutional, as in Europe, is due to the way in which the databases and information systems are financed. Most of the universities that contribute to scientific and technological research in the region are public and participate in national information systems. Given their reliance on public funds, these institutions rarely have the resources to finance an institutional CRIS system, much less purchase it as a package from the large companies that offer these services. It also contributes in this direction that the CRIS pilots appear in the public domain, which will be a strength in the medium and long term. Open software such as dSPACE, used as the basis of the platform in Peru, for example, guarantees that scientific information contributes to fulfilling the promise of open science, but at the same time offers a fruitful path to repatriate data and fight against asymmetries in the circulation of knowledge produced.

The paper addresses broadly the structural inequalities affecting low- and middle-income countries, pointing out the main asymmetries that condition open science pathways in the global South. The first part describes the global endowment of repositories, integrated scientific information systems and scientific journals. The second part focuses on the experience of Latin America, which has a collaborative infrastructure that has been developing since the 1950s, but still faces major challenges in making the transition from open access to open science. Finally, it discusses the critical role of evaluation systems in the region to produce a transformation of the magnitude of open science, without giving up sovereignty and social anchoring.