The research we conducted, which is available in a range of public deliverables, extends the state of the art in multiple ways:
- Our investigation of changing practices in the dissemination of scientific findings found that it is the higher ranked, more prosperous and more prestigious institutions that appear best able to adopt, adapt to, and benefit from, the evolving landscape of Open Access publishing. These trends hold true over time, on the global level, and when broken down to individual continents and subject areas (Sustainable Development Goals). Persistent structural inequalities in contemporary academic publishing are not necessarily remedied by the Open Science movement, with specific trends such as APC-driven OA publishing potentially worsening dynamics of cumulative advantage. If research on key global issues is only driven by well-resourced actors, it risks being oblivious to challenges faced by societies and communities less embedded into the global production of knowledge.
- Our analysis of documents on promotion, review and tenure within academic institutions shows that criteria for Open Science/RRI remain rare and measures associated with quantification largely dominate (albeit with some important differences between countries). Our international survey of researchers confirmed these findings. Looking ahead to how the academic reward system might be improved, we must be careful not merely to propagate the “tyranny of metrics” responsible for many of the ills within the current system. Simply uncritically introducing further indicators accounting for Open Science/RRI practices may do more harm than good.
- Investigating how science is taken up by policy-makers, we found many factors that are more important than Open Science. Additionally, Open Science and RRI, as they are currently practised within the contexts of academic and scientific institutions, are not doing enough and are not yet widely enough adopted to have a significant impact on expanding equitable participation in scientific knowledge production and policy-making. Further, we found that the Matthew effect and other forms of cumulative advantage and disadvantage are present within both processes, and are interacting with historical systems of inequality, including racism, sexism, ageism, classism and the lingering effects of colonialism.
Our final recommendations for funders, research institutions and researchers (
https://zenodo.org/record/6276753(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) developed together with a community of stakeholders spotlight dynamics of equity, especially as they relate to the need for truly open and shared infrastructures, services, and training, as well as the centrality of aligning rewards and recognitions to foster open and responsible practices. They also underline the need for global thinking in two senses of that term: greater shared understanding and dialogue amongst stakeholders from across the world and joined-up approaches which target reform of the research ecosystem as a whole. In highlighting these issues, we do not aim to imply that Open Research is anything other than the right direction of travel. However, given its commonly held aim of increasing equity, any potential for Open Research to actually drive inequalities must be taken seriously by the academic community in order to realise the aim of making science truly open and collaborative, and ensuring success in research is based, in the end, on merit.
