Editorial by Rachel A. Ankeny: “When we hear talk of ‘open science’, we often focus on the idea of what it means to make scientific knowledge and associated infrastructures more accessible, transparent, and collaborative, wondering for whom scientific results or methods are now more readily available (and whom not), and paying particular attention to problems associated with equity, justice, and fairness in open science and its practices. But to fully explore the ‘opening up’ of the processes and outputs of scientific research, it is equally important to ask how open science-related practices have changed contemporary science in perhaps unanticipated or unexpected ways. In short, how has open science affected what we consider to be or to count as ‘science’ and the practices associated with it?
Practices in scientific fields have always varied and evolved over time due to the interactions of diverse factors that go far beyond the epistemic and methodological content of science, as previously argued in our repertoires framework (Ankeny and Leonelli 2016) and as explored by many philosophers of science in practice. Thomas Gieryn’s use of ‘boundary work’ (Gieryn 1983, 1999) to capture the discursive strategies as well as the material and procedural tools which scientists use to separate legitimate science from other practices, and the fluidities of these boundaries, is more aligned with the questions that I wish to explore than are the factors highlighted in traditional, analytic debates over demarcation. If, as Gieryn describes it, the qualities ascribed to science change depending on the activities with which it is compared, it is important to pose the question of what expectations have come to be associated with ‘good’ scientific practices in the early twenty-first century and how these have been shaped by the ‘opening up’ of science. To put it another way: how can explorations of open science shed light on evolving understandings of what science is, who practices it, and what makes activities ‘scientific’? And as a result, have these understandings changed in ways that rely on fewer unwarranted presuppositions about what counts as ‘science’ and fostered greater equity? Note that I favour discourse related to ‘equity’ here rather than ‘democratisation’: the latter, with its focus on making scientific research, data, results, and so on widely accessible via open access to publications and data, is arguably critical and perhaps even necessary, but not sufficient, for opening up science on a deeper, epistemic level. However, openness is always context dependent and its instantiation complex in any real-life field or case (see e.g. Levin and Leonelli 2017). Furthermore, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution for achieving equity in these domains (Bezuidenhout 2025) as well illustrated by the papers in this special issue…(More)”.
