Responsibility

Abstract

Openness has become fashionable. Governments, software and even humans are furnished with the adjective 'open'. This is not a quiet and modest adjective, but entails a demanding cluster of requirements. To be open means to be transparent, responsible, accountable and inclusive. In other words: to be open is to be good. 1 What does this mean for science? If we understand openness as the commitment to make the tools and processes of science replicable and open to scrutiny, then science has had a particularly close relationship with openness from its earliest beginnings. It is true that science has been, and still is, to a large extent an elite activity. But the idea that people other than those involved in the creation of a scientific finding need to be able to scrutinise claims in order to find possible errors and to corroborate or falsify hypotheses and claims is intrinsic to the very concept of science. It is the requirement of transparency, intelligibility (if only to peers) and openness to scrutiny that distinguishes science from other instances of skilful practice or from an informed debate. Openness about how we arrive at conclusions on the basis of evidence is what enables the type of empirical self-corrective knowledge creation that science has (often rightly) claimed to be. Why is it, then, that openness-in science, but also in other domains of life-has become such a buzzword in the twenty-first century? There

Dynamics of cumulative advantage and threats to equity in open science: a scoping review

“…Implementation of Open Science must also be supported by policy. As Prainsack & Leonelli [ 59 ] argue, ‘open science is a political project to an even greater extent than it is a technological one’. In Europe, the Open Science policy landscape is highly variable across nations, funding organizations and institutions [ 60 ].…”

Meeting the needs of underserved populations: setting the agenda for more inclusive citizen science of medicine

“…Claims of democratisation generally envision a world in which patients have full access to their own data as well as medical technologies and are thus able to take on a far more proactive role in managing their health and well-being 4 50. While it is doubtlessly true that data may empower some, claims of democratisation merely via providing technical access to data have not been sufficiently demonstrated 16. Data access policies mirror socioeconomic inequalities within an assumed egalitarian landscape 51.…”

Data Sprint Learning. Exercising Proximity to Data in Teaching Situations

“…The choice of topic and desired outcome of the sprint was threefold. Firstly, we designed the sprint to act as a teaching situation where students would learn about Open Data as an ongoing controversy in science (Levin & Leonelli, 2016;Prainsack & Leonelli, 2018). Secondly, Open Data and sharing of research data was a topic that we, the organisers, were interested in and have published on (e.g., Kinder-Kurlanda et al, 2017;Kinder-Kurlanda & Weller, 2020;Sørensen & Kocksch, 2021).…”