No abstract

Open access is vindicated across diverse areas of scholarly practice, where it is often expected to overcome the material and symbolic barriers that stand in the way of knowledge circulation. However, whether openness is ultimately a good thing or not also seems to depend on which kind of knowledge is being opened and for whom. In this paper I draw on different areas of science, technology and society studies (STS) to suggest that the mainstream views on open access validate practices that may also constrain the possibilities of addressing social needs via scientific knowledge. Building on the case of open access for drug development initiatives in the field of neglected tropical diseases, I elaborate on the different forms of engagement and exclusions that persist in spite of supporting open access to the research data. Two ideas derived from STS are central to this critique: cognitive exploitation (processes through which third-parties turn non for-profit knowledge outputs into profits) and the relations between central actors and peripheries of scientific production. My claim is that the lack of capacities and the interposition of international, biologically-centered research agendas-not access restrictions per se-can hinder the utilization of locally applicable knowledge, deterring public participation in disadvantaged contexts.

En los últimos años, la participación desigual de mujeres en ciencia y tecnología ha sido objeto de atención política y de reflexión académica. En este trabajo, nos concentramos en la situación de las mujeres en dos organismos públicos de investigación y desarrollo en la Argentina - la Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA) y el Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA) - para comprender la forma en que estas desigualdades son problematizadas en fuentes documentales y académicas. Además de sistematizar aquellos procesos que aparecen como significativos para la producción de brechas y barreras de género, nuestro relevamiento busca identificar el rol atribuido a los mecanismos de reclutamiento, evaluación, y promoción científica y tecnológica. En ambas instituciones, existen problematizaciones de las brechas de género, así como también de las arbitrariedades e inconsistencias en los procesos institucionales de evaluación, pero ninguna de estas áreas de problematización dialoga con la otra. Retomando los aportes de la sociología política de la ciencia, proponemos que el abordaje de los mecanismos de reclutamiento, evaluación y promoción son clave para comprender las barreras de género que, en tanto mecanismos institucionalizados, dificultan el acceso de las mujeres a ciertas posiciones jerárquicas y áreas de experticia. El examen de estos mecanismos también podría contribuir con el desacople de nociones genéricas, como la de STEM, con las que ha sido abordada frecuentemente la problemática, poniendo el foco en los procesos institucionales propios de los organismos públicos de investigación y desarrollo.

Until the recent spread of public-private partnerships, pharmaceutical firms had avoided research and development into neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Because these are diseases that affect the poorest populations in developing regions, research and development initiatives have for the most part depended on the resources and expertise drawn from academia, international organizations, and intermittent state interventions in disease-endemic countries. Over the last few decades, however, public-private product development partnerships (PDPs) have been introducing new collaborative agreements in which the existing resources and expertise combine with the those traditionally withheld by the pharmaceutical industry and global health NGOs. This paper explores recent transformations in the representation of NTDs by examining the shifting logic and spaces of knowledge production which the advent of PDPs has enabled. An analysis of two case studies focused on Chagas disease-related initiatives addresses recurring preoccupations in Science, Technology and Society studies as well as in critical analyses of PDPs: that is, the back-and-forth movement of the disease from being an object of scientific inquiry to a public health concern, and the legitimacy risks and material asymmetries entailed in global health PDPs. Both cases show that it is major global health stakeholders and experts in non-endemic countries, rather than transnational pharmaceutical firms, that exert the greatest influence upon these changing representations: PDPs attempt to expand the preexisting biomedical focus on NTDs by means of incorporating “real world” drug development preoccupations (which I term epistemic shifts), but they also combine their stated global humanitarian aim with security concerns about the diseases spreading to non-endemic, industrialized countries (which I term geographical shifts).