An alternative open science framework

Notions of science being too closed have existed since the start of the first scientific journal and the establishment of the peer-review system (Nelhans and Nolin, 2022). J. D. Bernal, a 20th century physicist and Marxist interested in reforming the material conditions of science for its optimisation (De Bellis, 2009), stressed that science always needed an open relation to practice, instead of being closed as pure science. Scientific thought needed to be carried out in practice, and when scientists discovered how to do things, engineers got them done in practice. This ideal was only perverted by valuing science in terms of private profit and as a means of destruction in wars Bernal (1965). In 1939, to improve scientific communications, he proposed that a system of clearinghouses for the access and organisation of the scientific dissemination of results and articles would substitute the system of disparate and scattered out scientific journals. The clearinghouse system would store, organise and selectively disseminate the scientific information with new information technologies. Papers would be microfilmed and printed on demand, some copies would be sent to libraries and researchers with a registered interest in the subject (Bernal, 1939).

The idea of reforms of academic scholarly communication based in actual scientific behaviours and norms was developed further in academic discussions in the 1940s. Robert Merton saw “organized scepticism” as a defining feature of science, and academic peers’ critical scrutiny needed openness to function. This openness depended on the norm of “communism”, i.e. equal access to scientific outputs, and the ideal peer-review followed the norm of “universalism” and “disinterestedness” (Merton, 1973). Merton’s view correlated with Karl Popper’s post-war ideas on an open society based on rational deliberations which further introduced openness to the political and scientific debate (Leonelli, 2023; Tkacz, 2012, 2015).

Historically, Merton’s scientific disinterestedness was soon “overwhelmed by successful forms of knowledge commodification by powerful, well-resourced players” (Leonelli, 2023, p. 11) that contradicted the open exchange of scientific ideas. And Popper’s individualistic and freedom-oriented openness was in the end ineffective in shaping the collective scientific agency in a highly unequal and unregulated institutional landscape.

This tradition of scientific openness was often, except for Bernal, ambivalent to capitalism. The same ambiguity exists today. On the one hand, the Open Access (OA) movement and OS advocates are critical of capitalist and state access barriers to research, and warned already in 1985 about the scientific, social, and economic dangers of commodification and policies that obstructed the participation and access to knowledge (Chubin, 1985; Leonelli, 2023). On the other hand, the openness movement also wants to empower traditional research sharing with new online technologies that accelerate scholarly communication and connects it “to the temporal dynamic of capitalism that requires constant acceleration of economic growth” (Haider, 2018). And currently, national research grant councils and politicians, supported by the Finch report in 2012, nearly unanimously emphasizes OA’s role in ensuring “maximum economic and social impact” (Wellen, 2013, p. 4). Leonelli holds that parts of OS today are “increasingly aligned” with the publishing industry, and innovation and economic growth are emphasised by both private and public institutions that supports OS (Leonelli, 2023, p. 12).

To critique the rather nebulous phenomenon OS, has also proven to be a challenge. OS has been understood as an umbrella term consisting of at least five schools of thought: the infrastructure school (technological architecture), the public school (accessibility of knowledge creation), the measurement school (alternative impact measurement), the democratic school (access to knowledge) and the pragmatic school of thought (collaborative research). Such a definition encompasses “almost any dispute about the future of knowledge creation and dissemination” as it depends on the viewpoint of its advocates (Fecher and Friesike, 2014, p. 43). Fecher and Friesike’s rather imprecise definition easily impedes the critique of OS. Simultaneously, a critique of the already existing critique of OS as neoliberal has highlighted OS’ heterogeneity, rather than monolithic character. For a critique of OS as neoliberal to be valid, the authors stress, there is need of a theoretical mechanism that link OS’ methodology reforms to neoliberal ideology (Uygun Tunç et al., 2023). In contrast to these perspectives, and to foster critique, this article identifies, with the help of Vivek Chibber’s interpretation of the Marxian base/superstructure model, the dominant form of OS as a policy object, institutionally moulded after research funders and political institutions’ interest. Different tendencies and strands of OS exists, but they are marginal in comparison to this dominant form that is backed up by major institutional research funders.

The European Commission presented its “open-vision” in 2016. Open innovation was introduced first and OS second. The problem to be solved was that Europe, the world-leading “research powerhouse”, rarely succeeded in “turning research into innovation” and “getting research results to the market” (European Commission, 2016). Contemporary OS is tightly connected to industrial activity and the opening-up of science for applied research and entrepreneurship. However, EU’s vision also contains citizen science (CS) as a complement to open innovation (European Commission, 2023b). CS is closely connected to digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) and according to the European Commission, the technology makes it equally possible to crowdsource ordinary citizens’ brain power, as sharing rooms on the AirBnB platform (European Commission, 2016; Franzen, 2019).

OS, finally, takes off institutionally simultaneously as the openness ideology emerges and grows stronger (Jakobsson, 2012; Lund, 2017a; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Tkacz, 2012). The notion of an ideology of openness as an “unmitigated good” was proposed already in 1980s (Nolin, 2018). The current openness ideology is characterised by the importance given to open-business models based on a narrative of digital abundancy connected to Moore’s law and reproduction costs nearing zero. The narrative encompasses phenomena as open-source software (OSS), open data (OD) and open access (OA) to scientific content. It is implied that scarcity and enclosures are not needed for profits to be made, but the openness is always partial in the models. Capitalism’s excluding and conflict-ridden character is obscured by this open-washing practice (Golub and Lund, 2021; Lund, 2017a; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). The openness ideology’s precursors can be found in 1990s’ new economy of the dot.com-era’s Californian ideology with its digital win–win synergies between labour and capital (Barbrook and Cameron, 1995), the new millennia’s Web 2.0 hype with its networks effects (O’Reilly, 2006), and in the 2010s corporate co-optation of the sharing economy (AirBnB, Über etc.) that Trebor Scholz has criticised (Scholz, 2016). These ideological forms, emerging under the neoliberal era, have a libertarian character that conflates freedom with openness, mixing the free software movement’s idea of granting freedoms to act upon a given source code (Nolin, 2018) with Open-Source Initiative’s idea of code being open to be acted upon (Lund, 2017a; Tennant et al., 2020). This conflation of freedom and openness was a central piece of Lawrence Lessig’s (2004) book titled Free Culture.

The dominant presentation of OS takes on, as will be shown, a similar ideological character.

This article scrutinises how the dominant form of OS reshapes the relation between science and society and connects to the openness ideology. It provides an ideology critique of this OS framework currently affecting academic researchers’ practice with incentives and requirements for research funding. It poses critical questions to policy documents and mainstream research on OS: What kind of science, society and cooperation are presented in them? Not settling with critique, the article studies critical CS literature to formulate an alternative OS vision adapted to class society’s conflict-ridden character. The aim is to contribute to a critical discussion about what kind of (open) science society needs and how to empower it.

The concept openness has been critically problematised in Library and Information Science (LIS) literature in relation to transparency movements, knowledge movements, access, source code, and science and scholarship. A selection of these works will be briefly covered here as context.

Nolin (2018) remarks that questions of openness and transparency go back to the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, whereas its contemporary forms are tied to digital technologies, code, content and data. He contends that it is crucial to make a distinction between openness as fundamentally positive or as an unmitigated good, and points to the existence of different traditions and ideologies of openness. The libertarian ideology of openness is associated with free of restrictions rather than gratis (Nolin, 2018). This libertarian ideology has been scrutinised by Lund (2017a) in a study of Open Knowledge Foundation’s (OKF) open definition and advocacy for OD in the public sector. The study showed that the definition marginalised free software-inspired licenses conditioning a preserved openness in derivative works and uses. And instead of prioritising robust social commons, OKF favoured interoperability and so-called open business models, built on enclosing public rather than corporate OD.

Critical LIS studies on openness in scholarship have often circled around OA, open-source code and institutional policies. Haider (2007) found it intriguing how the OA movement’s origin in development initiatives for the global south combined with the embrace of Popper’s visionary open society and modernist claim to hegemonic truth by the scientific method. Empowering the global south involved giving the developing world “open and free access” to the developed world’s scientific system. Later, Haider (2018) also pointed critically to the temporal acceleration argument in OA and OS discourses, whereas Moore (2019) saw alternative and practical potentials with OA if it was not narrowed down and “enclosed” as a policy object by research funders and governments. Understanding OA as a boundary object with a shared flexibility could instead facilitate cooperation between many different communities of practices. In a similar vein, Tennant et al. (2020) argued that the diversity of the wider scholarly community made it hard to speak of one openness and saw the potential for many new academic communities of practice to form in the cross-fertilisation of the principles and practices of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) and Open Scholarship. Albeit with the warning that the current implementation of open scholarship paradoxically threatened to be a “more enclosed, monopolistic scholarly system” dominated by commercial actors’ and their corporate siloes (Tennant et al., 2020, p. 44). Finally, the making of OS into a policy object on the EU level during a public consultation process in 2014 and 2015 has been analysed critically by Nelhans and Nolin (2022). Several transparency issues were identified in the process that saw a normative OS concept substitute a descriptive “Science 2.0” concept in denoting transformative forms of scholarly research due to digitalisation. This normative and ideological move will here be theorised within the framework of the Marxian base/superstructure model.

Vivek Chibber takes Stuart Hall’s criticism of the base/superstructure model as a starting point for his interpretation of the model. Hall and the 1970s new left thought the model downplayed the importance of superstructural culture and ideology for the postwar stabilisation of capitalism. Chibber instead argues that the capitalist structure (base) has a dual logic, with an unequal distribution of class capacities between employers and employees, that both create and contain social conflict (Chibber, 2022). Thus, stability does not solely come from the superstructure’s ideology and culture, but mainly from the disciplining force of the capitalist structure (base) itself. Capitalist owners must survive in the market competition and workers are compelled to offer their labour power and hold on to their jobs. This structure ensures that workers chose “individualized forms of resistance over collective ones” because of the “risk/cost matrix associated with collective action” (Chibber, 2022, p. 155). Defending the core of the traditional model, Chibber narrows down the relevance of the model to the social actions and culture of the labour market, while other aspects of social and cultural life is “beyond the influence of the class structure” (Chibber, 2022, p. 119). This is the reason why capitalism generates “similar economic dynamics wherever it takes root” (Chibber, 2022, p. 119).

This rather crude model can be brought to generally bear on the relation between academic research and industry, between researchers and research funders, and researchers and their employers. Although, academic freedom creates some negotiating space for independent tendencies of OS in academia, this relative freedom is framed and influenced by research funders and employers’ interests. Interests for political institutions, research funders and the industry are increasingly focused on commodifying research to stay on top of the international market competition.

That said, the relative academic freedom requires, to some extent, the construction of ideological consent regarding OS, an ideology that can be analysed critically by using the above mentioned concept openness ideology.

The argument and critique of the dominant OS framework is built on four propositions and concludes with two proposals for an alternative OS. First proposition is an important conceptual clarification for the critique of the digitally grounded libertarian openness ideology: “‘Open’ is not synonymous with ‘free’”. To be open is to be open for others’ freedoms to act upon you. Second proposition concerns how the OS framework’s conception of society (analytically understood as academia’s outside), in EU policy and mainstream research on the subject, reflects upon itself: “OS’ conception of academia’s outside reveals its capitalist friendly and socially fragmented character”. Third proposition focuses on academia’s role within neoliberal and cognitive capitalism: “Academia’s inside is increasingly commodified and unbundled”. The fourth proposition presents how contemporary science is reshaped by the OS framework and broader commodification processes: “OS influences scientific research’s character in an instrumental, one-dimensional and uncritical way”. The argument is wrapped up with two proposals for how to counteract the openness ideology and the commodification of science. Proposal 1 introduces an alternative OS that combine critical reflexivity and instrumentality: “A politically explicit, socially progressive, and transparent OS vitalises science and emancipates academia from the spell of commodification”. Proposal 2, finally, introduces a new openness acknowledging the political dimensions of science: “An agonistic pluralist OS-framework avoids openness ideology’s supposedly non-political science and allows politically applied research”.

Wiktionary presents openness and freedom as unconstrained and unimpeded phenomena, but the concepts differ in a crucial way. A freedom to act is something different than something’s or someone’s openness for other actors’ actions upon it. Being opposites in their respectively unconstrained positions, they both face challenges in social life (Lund, 2017a). Someone’s freedom is someone else’s unfreedom, and someone’s openness has only a passive character when it is open for everyone else’s freedom to act upon it (and even enclose it).

This social reality is not a problem within the digital openness ideology. Moore’s law on digital technology teaches us that the reproduction cost of digital files nears zero, and mainstream economics establishes that immaterial works are non-rivalrous and can be consumed without ceasing to exist. The openness ideology is defined by this “information exceptionalism” (Söderberg, 2008) that justifies openness’ passive acceptance of others’ intruding actions. An unconstrained openness is not a problem when the original file version is still openly available, despite all reuses and derivative works that are privately enclosed (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). Abundancy rules and digital capitalism is therefore without conflicts and full of win–win synergies. Advocates of the openness ideology recognise no need for an active and conditioned openness in society, with an agency of its own. They see no need for an explicitly political openness.

Instead, the openness ideology representatives conceal the enclosures that their so-called open business models require to function in a capitalist economy. The openness is always partial, regardless the rhetoric. This mix of openness and enclosures is structured and exploited in new ways under cognitive capitalism. Partial kinds of openness are used to push down the price of inputs, rather than pulling up prices of outputs with paywalled commodities, but in the end, the business models always rest on some private enclosures (Lund, 2017a; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). As language and cognition today are increasingly put to work as wage labour (Lazzarato, 1996, 2014; Virno, 1996), they are also increasingly co-opted as user-generated unwaged labour (Fuchs, 2014) or exploited as raw material for rent extraction on digital platforms that enclose data and sell data profiles to advertisers (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Vercellone, 2010).

The argument can be further exemplified. OSS is often enclosed in derivative uses or by streaming the code from cloud services. This leads to a relative increase of enclosed source code on the societal level. In the process, capitalist firms often pervert the commons-based peer-production of open-source code (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). Similarly, the dominant OA form within academic publishing is predicated on the unconditional openness of the CC-BY-license that is open for subsequent enclosures and high article processing charges (APCs) that functions as pay walls for academic authors (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). A less favoured OA form instead builds on parallel publishing of articles in subscription-based journals and open digital archives after an extended embargo period. Finally, the contemporary advocacy for open government wants public and citizens data to be open (except for data protected by secrecy acts), but never corporate data, data profiles or algorithms (Golub and Lund, 2021; Lund, 2017a; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). Platform companies use End User Licence Agreements (EULAs) to first open users’ data for use, and secondly to enclose and sell them as corporate user profiles to advertisers (Lund, 2017a; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020).

In the openness ideology, these social, economic and political conflicts are concealed, and an unconditional and unconstrained openness that easily is exploited by corporate actors within cognitive capitalism is favoured.

This critique of the openness ideology is valid, as we will see next, in relation to the dominant OS framework. Once again, the suggested openness must be socially contextualised to demonstrate our point. How is society perceived in the OS framework?

OS activates the question about science and its role in society. Does society bear the stamp of win–win synergies or of social conflicts? Should science prioritise an openness for corporate businesses or for social actors and democracy, or some combination?

EU’s preferred stakeholders in OS can be narrowed down to industry and citizens. Academia is envisioned to build partnerships around innovation and CS (European Commission, n.d., 2016; 2023b), but the partnerships’ perceived character, inherent power structures and digital ICTs’ influence need illumination.

A majority of policy-making and research articles on OS circles around open innovation (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021). Horizon 2020 specifically intended to reinvent Europe’s “innovation economy” by addressing the “lack of industrial take-up of new scientific knowledge” and encourage such development with new funding (Chesbrough, 2015, p. 3, 7, n11). Focus within the research program was on removing innovation barriers and disciplinary silos within academia to solve the “applicability gap” between deep and narrow disciplinary expertise and a complex reality (Stamm, 2019). Multi-disciplinarity was preferred because of practical and instrumental reasons.

Chesbrough has been a leading figure behind the concept open innovation since 2003, when he coined the concept, and has since built a research community around it (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021). Interestingly, he warns that OS’s norms “create challenges that impede the commercialization of knowledge” that requires “the discovery and development of a business model” (Chesbrough, 2015, p. 3). In his view, OS is an instrument for open innovation, albeit a problematic one. An outspoken position that somewhat breaks off from an open-washing ideology. Beck et al. (2022, 2023), on the other hand, embrace more ideological positions in two articles on the concept Open Innovation in Science (OIS). They promote an open and collaborative science that integrates the innovation theme into the entire scientific process, adapted to specific community-based practices in academia and translating insights into innovation (Beck et al., 2022, online 2020, p. 165; 2023). The academia–industry partnership here changes form, and innovation leaves academia’s outside and moves to the inside, where “scientific knowledge can be understood through the concept of open innovation” (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021). Other researchers have gone further and propose the remaking of universities into open knowledge institutions together with external stakeholders (Gray et al., 2021), and the European Commission, policy makers, research funders and think tanks have all recently argued for a tighter coupling of science and innovation with openness as a “connecting piece” (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021). One central device for this is Creative Commons’ CC BY-license that purports an unqualified openness open for enclosures. It is the default license advocated by EU (cOAllition S, 2021).

The concrete OIS version of OS is well aligned with EU’s broader vision. Established practices around research and development (R&D) contracts further helps to identify the enclosures that are naturalised by OIS. Such contracts often articulate a compromise between stakeholders that stipulate a “delay in publication until intellectual property rights are secured” by the industrial firm (Sohn and Lee, 2012). In Sweden, patent processes – when activated – approximately result in four to six months of delays (Koch, 2024), and Schaeffer adds that increased use of patenting leads to increased use of Material Transfer Agreements (MTA) that controls the use and diffusion of scientific materials (Schaeffer, 2019). The focus on openness without problematising the enclosures aligns well with the openness ideology.

Besides innovation, EU emphasises efficiency and interoperability in relation to OS’ outreach. OS will improve the “quality, efficiency and responsiveness of research” and help to “diffuse the latest knowledge” (European Commission, 2023b). EU’s top-ranked policy ambition concerns data sharing in line with the FAIR-principles of findable, accessible, interoperable and re-useable data (European Commission, 2023b), and emphasises technical interoperability and machine effectivity in academia’s relation to predominantly industrial partners. Innovation, industry partnerships, commodification, technological efficiency and interoperability lie at the core of EU’s OS vision and are supported by the scientific community behind the OIS perspective.

This technical and instrumental focus is a central piece of the openness ideology. Technical efficiency in a capitalist economy is ideologically prioritised by licenses that accept enclosures and private exploitation of open entities. The empowering of the commons-based peer-production of the open entities always comes second in turn after commercial and technical interoperability (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Stallman, n.d.). In this case, the scholarly peer-production comes second.

Some OIS advocates are explicit about this prioritisation. Beck et al. are inspired by the information exceptionalism argument (Söderberg, 2008). They characterise non-rivalrous digital goods as “inverse commons” (Beck et al., 2023, p. 224) that can be openly accessible and endlessly exploited without any assumed tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). This renders the researchers’ experiences of the production and publication process invisible.

In conclusion, corporations’ power to negotiate their role within OS is anchored in strong policy support from EU, in naturalised patent procedures and in support from researchers advocating the OIS concept. However, EU also talks about another social actor, civil society’s citizen, as a partner in its OS framework.

The uneven power relation between academia and the citizen scientists is not clearly stated in EU’s OS framework. Citizen groups are listed last of external stakeholders including other partners from academia, industry and public authorities (European Commission, 2023b). Beck et al., for their part, list CS as part of OIS (Beck et al., 2023), the latter being the unproblematised dominant category. Neither of them says anything about social movements (or commoners) in a civil society characterised by conflicts, complex power relations and complicated democratic processes.

Still, citizens are understood as a social group, but a special kind of loosely knit collective connected to digital ICTs. Franzen points out that digital ICT facilitates a CS that crowdsources individual citizen’s skills and brain power (Franzen, 2019). This understands the social in the form of networks and is focused on individuals-as-nodes constituting a sociality that has been critiqued for its weak social links that ideologically aligns with a neoliberal downplaying of class society (Fisher, 2013; Lovink, 2016). CS in this form treats citizens as networked individuals that digitally contribute to “wisdom of crowds” that compensate for the individuals’ lack of knowledge and expertise (Franzen, 2019).

Researchers have developed typologies of CS based on power relations, differing aims and epistemic practices (Strasser et al., 2019). First, a typology based on stakeholders’ mutual power relations (governing mechanisms and degrees of cooperation) resulted in five types of CS: contractual, contributory, collaborative, co-created and a collegial type (Bonney et al., 2009; Haklay, 2013; Shirk et al., 2012). Second, a goal-based typology resulted in five CS-focuses: action (local agendas), conservation (natural resource management), investigation (data collection), virtual (online research) and science education (Wiggins and Crowston, 2011). And finally, an epistemic typology identified five concrete practices: sensing, computing, analysing, self-reporting and making (Strasser et al., 2019). These different typologies are here understood in light of Franzen’s argument that OS emerges at the same time as digital technology starts to generate natural and social data suitable for large-scale analysis, e.g. big data science. Franzen concludes that “[b]ehind the trend towards data-intensive research lies an interpretation of citizen science other than as a process of ‘democratising’ science or ‘empowering’ citizens” (Franzen, 2019, p. 352). Within EU’s framework, the foremost role for citizen scientists is to provide data and simple forms of analysis (Franzen, 2019), and to orthodoxically contribute rather than rebelliously co-create (Pocock et al., 2014; McQuillan, 2014) within a “scripted participation of the non-credentialed public”, that has no “political input into the agenda or governance of science itself” (Mirowski, 2018, p. 177). This presents a picture of CS as activated on the lower levels of the typologies, in relation to self-reporting of contributory data collection and sensing.

Strasser et al. (2019) question if European OS “really aims at empowering lay people in relation to science”, and asks if it instead is “yet another effort at governing the critique of science” (Strasser et al., 2019, p. 67). They conclude that there is a need for clarifications about CS: Should it create an alliance between the state, science and technology through a citizenry embracing the latter two? Or empower public and critical use of scientific tools, resisting scientific hegemony? Or, finally, create a “robust deliberative democracy” by fostering citizens’ scientific reasoning (Strasser et al., 2019, p. 67)? There are strong indications that EU favours a variation of the first alternative: CS gives all citizens and ordinary people a chance to “take part in extraordinary research”, giving professional scientists more data that improves the research’s precision and generate “more lines of enquiry” (European Commission, n.d.).

Citizens should thus voluntarily and instrumentally enrich academic research and commercially oriented innovation, and develop trust in science without having the power to negotiate the forms of their participation, rather than empower popular and collective scientific activities outside of academia. Franzen even takes the critique further arguing that CS could be a transitional phenomenon “towards a progressive automation of knowledge production” (Franzen, 2019, p. 352).

These contemporary processes can be placed within historical processes of academic commodification, to which the argument now turns. This context helps us to expose OS and the openness ideology further and in subsequent steps analyse their effects on scholar activities and research.

Science’s connection to capitalism runs through historic phases. Mirowski (2018) argues against openness advocates’ view of science as operating in the same monolithic modality through the centuries. According to him, there were three 20th century historical scientific regimes. The first regime (American pragmatism) holds the idea that science should be accepted and supported by the public, have no knowledge monopoly, and be more democratic in a self-governing and participatory way that improved the communal intelligence. A second Cold War regime instead favoured expert academics and a representational rather than participatory democracy. And finally, after 1980, market considerations gradually substituted military and state-funded science, and science was increasingly organised by “corporate patrons and academic contractors” (Mirowski, 2018. p. 176).

Regardless of the shifting regimes suggested, Mirowski points to a structural break in modern science’s character with OS’s marriage of a collaborative science ethos and platform capitalism’s understanding of the market as a super information processor (Mirowski, 2018). This is an overstatement. Instead, and more consistently, the neoliberal regime of science and OS are part of the broader historic phase of cognitive capitalism, being a product of both historic change and continuity.

Marx wrote about a coming era of a general intellect in Grundrisse. The historical development of the productive forces, in the competitive struggle for surplus profits, was increasingly connected to scientific inquiry and less to technological inventions stemming from industrial practice (Marx, 1867, 1973). The general intellect pointed towards the future of the second wave of industrialisation (in its early innings at the time of Marx’s writing) with its increased reliance on dead labour, i.e. scientifically built machines (Marx, 1973), and beyond. Newer autonomist Marxist interpretations (Negri, 1989; Moullier-Boutang, 2011; Virno, 2004) have since then connected the concept to an informational or cognitive capitalism where leading economic segments, and a mutated cultural industry, require the active communicative participation by the socialised worker even during free time, and in the wider society or the social factory (a concept first used by Mario Tronti in 1962). All of this facilitated by a digital technology focused on flexible labour organisation and just-in-time production. Some autonomist Marxists even deny the existence of an outside to contemporary capitalism (Negri, 2008), whereas others defend the commons as an outside (Caffentzis, 2010) and the importance of the capital relation, the ongoing systematic exploitation of wage labour (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). The latter position aligns with Chibber’s interpretation of the base/superstructure model.

Framed like this, the dominant form of OS with its instrumental focus on innovation and marketisation is part of an historic struggle to contain, control, adapt and profit from the productive forces in academia. It struggles to integrate academic research, through open innovation and CS, with productive and profitable uses in the social factory.

On a more concrete level, critical research has examined the neoliberal transformation of academia since the 1990s. Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie introduced the concept academic capitalism in 1997 (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), and Slaughter and Gary Rhoades developed the framework further in 2004 (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). In it, the “entrepreneurial university” is characterised by “third stream funding” that establishes central ties with commercial entities, often mediated by philanthropy-sponsored NGOs or by university trustees from large corporation boards (Slaughter, 2014). These processes create new institutional actors that emerge from the interstices of already existing organisations at the university (Slaughter, 2014). In the end, they conform and align university managerial structures to the neoliberal state, and incentivise, monitor and discipline an “increasingly differentiated faculty” with “increasing numbers of nonacademic professionals” (Slaughter, 2014, p. 12–13, 17). These developments have been described as an academic unbundling in relation to open academic content in research and education. Tension between market commodification and the academic commons has been generated in relation to OA megajournals and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Megajournals, on the one hand, experiment with a simplified and standardised peer review pre-publication, and crowdsourced and technical forms of post-publication peer-review. Digital ICTs allows for the unbundling of research editing, peer review and dissemination. Different providers can deliver the functions separately. MOOCs, on the other hand, allow external and non-collegial forces to shape curriculum. Commercial educational actors could either issue online digital diplomas for informal experiences and competences, or provide degree awarding higher educational institutions (HEI) with digitally recorded education, used to cut costs. The system encourages academic freelancing (Wellen, 2013).

Thus, contemporary science is not “confined to disciplinary or academic boundaries” (Mirowski, 2018, p. 176). The academic commons is becoming increasingly tilted toward the corporate sector when the economic logic of a historic neoliberal regime, that used to leave at least some leeway to structure academia as a commons not constrained by price and permissions, has deepened (Wellen, 2013, p. 2). This leads to another kind of fragmentation than closed disciplinary silos. OS’s focus on pragmatic open innovation encourages and amplifies corporate actors’ presence in academia’s inner workings and makes external boundaries porous, whereas citizen scientists often are superficially involved in academic life, functioning mostly as data generators on lower levels in the social factory. All of this, taken together, promote new circuits of knowledge that link state agencies, corporations and universities in entrepreneurial endeavours (Slaughter, 2014) and introduce new configurations of enclosures and openings in academic practices related to patents, licenses, start-ups, research parks and incubators, as well as student market activity, academic tourism and open e-learning businesses (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Slaughter, 2014). The OIS perspective explicitly empowers this integral process of cognitive capitalism’s overall exploitation of human culture, communication and knowledge production.

The commodification and unbundling of academic science happen against the backdrop of a complex reconfiguration of the wider relation between science and industry. In a recent study, Hartmann and Henkel concludes:

Contemporary corporations shift away from basic research in-house as academic capitalism and OIS make academia more business-friendly and perforated by corporate interests, although not in relation to central commodities in cognitive capitalism: data, data mining technologies and data driven research.

These historic processes are taken for granted within the dominant OS framework that downplays any critique of capitalism and uses openness as an ideological door opener. The coupling of science and capitalist innovation with openness makes openness a “false friend” according to its critics, as openness has been “defined and mobilised” differently by science and industry historically (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021, p. 426). A decoupling between economic research policy-making “on emerging technologies” and “strategic objectives of powerful technology corporations” is suggested as a solution (Heimstädt and Friesike, 2021, p. 434).

The invisibility of capitalism’s contradictions in the OS framework, finally, precludes a critical debate about the continuously deepening commodification and unbundling of academia, but also empowers the processes and pave the way for their connected knowledge forms. As we will see, OS policies promote a specific form of multidisciplinary research.

OS is understood as a central policy and standard method by EU (European Commission, 2023b). The platform EU-Citizen.Science (EU-Citizen.Science, n.d.-a; European Commission, n.d.) exemplifies the drive to standardise OS research methods by mainstreaming and profiling CS projects and collecting tools to avoid duplicating efforts (EU-Citizen.Science, n.d.-b; Wagenknecht et al., 2021). The critique of this standardised research methodology for better replicability of results as being neoliberal has itself been critiqued for being simplistic (see Introduction). On the other hand, the critique of the critique admits that “a big part of the scientific reform movement can be characterized by a critical attitude toward the questionable methodological habits in the social, behavioural, and life sciences” (Uygun Tunç et al., 2023). There are thus indications that science, as in natural science, is the favoured kind of research in the dominant OS framework.

At the same time, the dominant framework on the policy level involves breaking down the boundaries of scientific disciplines. EU’s Horizon 2020 favours multi-disciplinarity (Stamm, 2019), and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) wants to provide a “federated and open multi-disciplinary environment” (European Commission, 2023a).

Leonelli addresses this tension between standardisation and multidisciplinarity. She contends that the relation between openness and standards is not systematically well understood. She warns that:

The centre of gravity in the OS framework’s open, multidisciplinary, and standard method is, furthermore, applied science, rather than basic science. The latter concept is often absent from governments and industry’s vocabulary, whereas “research and innovation” is defined as the field of responsibility (Godin, 2019, p. 185). Mirowski argues that “the previous sharp distinction between pure and applied science has dissolved” in the current neoliberal regime “as knowledge has come to be portrayed as both generated within and validated by a marketplace of ideas” (Mirowski, 2018, p. 176)

The ideal of applied science is common in the natural sciences with a history of close ties to industry (Godin, 2019). Since Second World War, the place for basic or pure science has increasingly been negatively related to a mythical ivory tower of societal detachment and political disengagement. Mythical because the university institution has always been intermingled with society, with political and economic engagement on one side and reflective and abstract thought on the other side. The two sides being phases in the knowledge production rather than fixed places (Shapin, 2012). During the Cold War, anyway, natural sciences and engineers en masse felt they left the detached ivory tower, leaving the humanities behind. And from this time on, according to Shapin (2012), most natural scientist could find constituencies and positions outside the universities, and by the end of 1970s, the mythical ivory tower was judged to be an entirely bad place, with laws designed and introduced to stimulate an academic commercialisation that moved ideas from the ivory tower to the marketplace.

Godin contends that the current focus on innovation occurs at a moment in history that sees a “marginalization of research in scholarly and public discourses” (Godin, 2019, p. 185), and almost no one is in favour of disengaged and abstract reflections in the ivory tower (Shapin, 2012).

The current OS quest for improved replicability and an elevated utility of research delineates the forms of the engagement. It does not advocate the engagement guiding critical research and critical theory (CT), conducted in non-standardised and non-instrumental ways, from various theoretical positions and perspectives. The dominant OS framework implicitly wants to organise this critical tradition with strong ties to the social sciences and humanities under an increasingly standardised and instrumental (natural) scientific umbrella.

The OS framework of EU thus downplays not only basic scholarly activities for the benefit of business-friendly and applied natural sciences, but also critical forms of engagement. Simultaneously it aims to encompass all of academia’s disciplines. The push for OS connotates open scholarship and includes the humanities according to some (Burgelman et al., 2019), whereas others stress that “Science 2.0” was the European Commission’s favoured concept in the early 2010s (Nelhans and Nolin, 2022) when the European Science Foundation (ESF) proposed collaboration between social and life sciences (Stamm, 2019). From a critical perspective, and science being a narrower concept in at least the Anglo-Saxon world, the combination of OS with a wider academic aim (scholarship) adds to the sensation that self-reflexive social sciences and humanities ideally should follow the lead of more instrumental and standardised natural sciences.

This set-up has similarities with the US Gulbenkian Commission’s call to Open the social sciences in 1996 (Wallerstein, 1996). The commission advocated a pluralistic universalism against western universalism and tried to unify the social sciences with the natural sciences, much alike the “multi-disciplinarity” proposed by EU. Michael Burawoy leveraged a critique of the proposal in 2007 (Burawoy, 2007) that can be used as a heuristic and structuring tool for the article’s argument.

Burawoy stressed that the commission did not ask the central questions: Research for whom and for what? This critique is also relevant in relation to the dominant OS framework in EU. His critique was summarised in a table based on how science was done in practice. The table had an “academic and extra-academic” axis and an “instrumental and reflexive” one. It visualised four types of scientific knowledge: professional, critical, policy and public knowledge (Burawoy, 2007, p. 139) (see Table 1).

Burawoy contended that the four different knowledge forms come with “fundamentally different practices” and “different criteria of truth, modes of legitimation, notions of politics, regimes of accountability, and pathological tendencies” (Burawoy, 2007, p. 140). Natural sciences were distinguished from humanities in their emphasis on instrumental knowledge and its applications, whereas the humanities focused on reflexive knowledge: “that is, a concern with dialogue about meaning, the fundamental values of society” (Burawoy, 2007, p. 140). He contended that social sciences “lie at the crossroads of these opposed bodies of knowledge”, trying to combine instrumental and reflexive knowledge (Burawoy, 2007, p. 140).

Current dominant OS sees instrumental knowledge as a bridge between academia and extra-academia, both as audiences and producers. The productive tone in OS with its instrumental knowledge for open innovation changes Burawoy’s category of professional knowledge. Professional knowledge becomes increasingly like the policy category when professional instrumental knowledge is extra-academically produced and discussed by an unbundled academia. The OIS strand within the dominant OS framework, furthermore, imposes an economic rationality on the framework’s CS part which affects the category of public knowledge, with its expected reflexive dimension. The process is reinforced by the weak incitement for citizens’ reflexive knowledge production in the OS framework. Instead, citizens’ instrumental data generation and collection are increasingly aligned with the production of a mix of commodified professional and policy knowledge in an increasingly unbundled academia, whereas reflexive knowledge is mainly activated by citizens’ identification of relevant scientific problems, which holds some promise of stimulating critical knowledge production.

Burawoy’s critical and public knowledge categories therefore run the risk of not being optimally developed within the OS framework. The public knowledge risks taking on the character of a top-down administrated reflexivity and domesticated critical thinking when citizens’ role as research subjects are limited and predominantly directed toward open innovation. This logic implies that scholars in less instrumentalized and more critically reflexive humanities will be negatively affected by EU’s version of OS.

This critique activates the question of alternatives to the current OS framework.

Retreating to a mythical ivory tower that never really existed will not suffice to identify the alternative potentials for critical and reflexive research. Instead, historical and sociological perspectives on research in academia, that give importance to societal contradictions and possibilities, could offer a way forward. A political reading of science is crucial to save critical and reflexive research in a historical era of cognitive and academic capitalism.

In Walter Benjamin’s critical analysis of The Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the new work of art functioned both as a cause and remedy for the “impoverishment of human experiences” (Jeffries, 2017, p. 177). This sensibility for political threats with, and potentials beyond, one-dimensional capitalist instrumentality was continued in relation to scientific research by Herbert Marcuse. He critiqued the supposedly objective and neutral positivism that focused on the “how” rather than the “why” question in its research (Marcuse, 1972). Following this tradition and Burawoy’s critique, this text assumes first that the current OS framework’s commodified applied science does not have optimal social effects and risks to predominantly impoverish science’s effect on society, and second that there exist hidden potentials in the OS framework that could be pursued.

If so-called pure basic science in the academic ivory tower is dialectically confronted by an instrumental OS immersed in capitalism, then a socially progressive synthesis could be a critical OS that is instrumental for the popular multitudes. Meaning, an alternative version of OS that combines Burawoy’s knowledge forms differently, favouring a critical and instrumental approach to counteract the effects of academic capitalism, rather than having a conservative and reactive focus on basic research as the solution. That said, the proportion between instrumentally applied and basic research in academia will still be an unresolved political question, depending on power struggles and chosen political, scientific, and academic strategies.

A critical and applied OS needs to rethink openness in ways that take capitalism’s conflict-ridden character into account. Humanities scholar Stuart Lawson suggests that the concept openness should be problematised to clarify what kind of openness we are talking about (Lawson, 2020) and Lund and Zukerfeld contend that openness needs to be conditioned to empower digital production of non-profit co-ops and commons-based projects (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). The openness question related to academia circulates around three aspects: research’s character, work practices and legality. What kind of applied science should be pursued and for whom? How does openness structure the production process between external stakeholders and academia? Could copyright licenses be developed to protect research from corporate co-optation and empower commons-based research?

This article put forward two proposals for a revised OS framework focused on applied science. The first argues for a specific political form of OS. The second presents an overall framework that accommodates various and opposing political versions of OS in order to tear down the ideological veil that portrays science as an open, apolitically instrumental and non-conflictual venture.

The cooperation between academic scholars and societal actors focuses on scholarly research. Transparency, thoroughness, a systematic approach and collegial peer-review are obligatory. But what epistemological perspectives should structure this partnership-based research? Logical positivism’s value-free science is dismissed in this article as an impossibility when dealing with scientific problems rooted in conflict-ridden social landscapes with vested interests. Such a critical position has been suggested in the literature on CS (Ottinger, 2016) and finds support in the tradition of CT going back to the 1930s (Horkheimer, 1972) as well as to the Marxist critique of political economy (Marx, 1867). In CT, the researcher’s theoretical perspective must be clearly presented (Liedman, 1989), and the tradition’s orbit spans the spectrum from social constructivism to critical realism (Leckie et al., 2010).

It is within this orbit that the article proposes an OS understood as open scholarship, with a focus on a CS that strengthens commons and social movements rather than corporations. It is possible to regulate the mix of openness and enclosures in relation to corporate and social actors differently. Radical copyright licenses based on different political economic baselines than Creative Commons, and other agreements around data, could be designed to empower social actors’ real rather than formal freedoms, and empower independent and robust research commons built on flexible cooperation between academia and them (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Cohen, 2006; Parijs, 1995). OS and CS projects, protective of science’s critical dimensions, should favour such cooperations between scholars and non-corporate social actors, combining critique and applied scientific approaches. Intellectual support could be found in the traditions of participatory research and action research, as well as from the Marxist tradition of workers’ inquiry. Cooperations with corporate actors would always need to be evaluated from their strategic or tactical importance in strengthening the commons-based projects, rather than the other way around.

Community-based research and participatory action research, inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Oppressed (Freire, 2018; Gutberlet et al., 2014), connects “scholars and lay people to produce knowledge that could solve local problems” (Strasser et al., 2019). And if these local problems have a systemic and structural character, the popular education and community-based research could turn “into a key political project for social transformation” (Gutberlet et al., 2014). This radical knowledge production and social transformation effect understands CS as a kind of counter-expertise (Strasser et al., 2019). A perspective that Ottinger deepens and narrows to a social movement-based CS where the research questions grow from citizen scientists’ experiences and concern larger social problems. In this framework the credentialed scientist functions as an ally, “providing resources and advice”, rather than leads the research. The radical research form challenges standard scientific approaches, but also confronts the citizen scientists with trade-offs “between scientific legitimacy and political efficacy” (Ottinger, 2016, p. 90–91) and “between increasing the scientific authority of their claims and amplifying their critiques of science as it is usually practiced (Ottinger, 2016, p. 99)”.

Workers’ inquiry in turn is a method to “investigate the workplace from the point of the worker”. The method was suggested already in Marx writings and was developed further by the American Trotskyist tendency known as the Johnson–Forest Tendency, the French collective Socialism ou Barbarie and the Italian Workerist tradition (Operaismo) (Woodcock, 2014, p. 493).

Participatory action research and workers’ inquiry turn the table on the mainstream OS with its critical and applied research. Academia’s science is co-opted by a community and workers’ science. The traditions are political, and cooperation with them involves both scientific and political trade-offs for academia.

Participatory action research and workers’ inquiries promise to counterbalance the commodification of academia with its cooperation with social movements on relevant scientific problems, their investigation and the application of scientific outcomes. Academia can be reinvigorated by this shift from “deliberation to production” (Strasser et al., 2019). Social sciences and humanities, that today are shoehorned into the OS framework, could play a crucial role in this critical and genuinely multi-disciplinary venture.

Franzen points out digital ICT as a factor behind the current OS vision. ICT facilitates crowdsourcing of citizens’ data points and rudimentary analysis (Franzen, 2019). However, the research focus on digital ICTs could be rewired in the traditions of participatory action research and workers’ inquiry. It could be both, the topic of research and vitalise research methods.

A recent study investigated Deliveroo drivers’ reliance on WhatsApp in organising a strike against an algorithmic management. The workers realised the possibility of countering the manager’s gathering of precise data with their own data, and an article was co-written on the topic by an academic scholar and a Deliveroo rider (Woodcock, 2021).

Digital commons-based peer-production, furthermore, can contribute to new forms of research organisation. It has existed for more than 2 decades, and have been extensively researched (Benkler, 2006; Lund, 2017b; O’Neil et al., 2021). Academia, understood as the original peer-production, and even EU, have started to experiment with digital projects that want to empower, develop and make scholar-led diamond OA-publishing sustainable (Adema and Moore, 2018, 2021; Becerril et al., 2021; Bosman et al., 2021; Moore, 2019; Moore, 2021). Such platforms could be rewired for scholarly and social actor-led diamond OA publishing of research results. Recently suggested new copyright licenses or data agreements (Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020; Morozov, 2015) could furthermore counteract the openness ideology with a new mix of enclosures and openness.

Suggestions as these strengthen scholars and social movement groups’ collective bargaining power vis-à-vis the corporate sector and foster a non-standardised critical bibliodiversity (Shearer et al., 2020) based on a multitude of new ways of doing science.

The proposed overall OS framework accommodates various explicit and transparently presented politics to break with the openness ideology’s hidden politics and enclosures. The framework allows for a spectrum of progressive, conservative and liberal versions of OS. Logical positivism, on the other hand, would need to acknowledge the political dimensions of its research in this alternative OS framework.

Chantal Mouffe’s theory of agonistic pluralism (Mouffe, 1999) functions as a structuring principle for the framework. It makes a distinction between politics and the political. The concept “politics” refers to institutions, practices and discourses struggling to establish a certain order, whereas the “political” refers to the general dimension of antagonism inherent in human society (Mouffe, 1999). Proposal 1 concerns the politics and proposal 2 the political.

Agonistic pluralism, in the political sense, is based in a critique of a liberal political theory dominated by an “individualistic, universalistic, and rationalistic framework” that impedes the understanding of a “pluralistic democratic public sphere” by not recognising power dimensions and antagonism, e.g. the political dimension of social objectivity (Mouffe, 1999, p. 745 quote, 752). An OS framework based in agonistic pluralism does not attempt to eliminate power but to constitute “forms of power that are compatible with democratic values” (Mouffe, 1999, p. 753).

Actual OS projects within this framework need to honour the framework by being transparent with their specific theories, value assumptions and politics, so that adversaries can engage with them, honouring the political dimension in society by transforming antagonisms into agonism. At least three kinds of politics need to be accommodated. The first is the progressive politics of proposal one. The second, given the resurgence of the political far-right (Doval and Souroujon, 2021), is a reactive scientific backlash based in political conservativism and their corresponding social actors. The third alternative is a continued liberal OS that is politically explicit and transparent about empowering capitalist governed innovation and enclosures that affects the scholarly communication and peer-production.

The preceding arguments on OS follow two trajectories. In the first trajectory, EU’s OS framework is predominantly connected to OIS and wants to transfer the applied science perspective to the humanities within a broader call for multidisciplinary open scholarship open for external stakeholders, predominantly the industry, under (natural) science’s umbrella. This gradual trajectory points to the ongoing commodification and unbundling of the entrepreneurial university. The second trajectory is dialectically stylised. A presumed academic basic research in the ivory tower meets its reaction, antithesis, in an OS of streamlined and applied science focused on non-problematised and instrumental corporate innovation that naturalises exploitation of data collecting citizens. The suggested synthesis put forward is a political and agonistic pluralist OS framework including at least three forms of politics.

The agonistic pluralist framework suggests a politically reformed academia connected to an applied scholarship of a new kind.

Humanities’ (and social sciences) progressive potential to challenge the commodification is implied in proposal 1. It suggests that a cooperation between critical and reflexive academic research and organized social groups could result in new forms of research praxis and politics that strengthen a social CS in non-standardised ways. However, the first trajectory’s deeper and gradual commodification of academia put some lid on the prospects for the proposal.

Making a distinction between an overall agonistic OS framework connected to the political and the concrete politics of specific scientific projects, anyway, holds a promise of opening academia to theoretical and political struggles between adversaries in a transparent and mutually respectful way. This would reinvigorate academic research. Not forgetting that open, critical and instrumentally applied scholarship, simultaneously, requires that all political scientific projects adhere to the scholarly ethos. Otherwise, it is not scholarship, only politics. The overall open scholarship framework should therefore be regulated and not unconditioned or unrestricted. How these negotiations and decisions will be conducted is a crucial but still an unresolved question.

Finally, an extended treatment of the possible implications of the suggested reforms will have to wait for another time. But to conclude, academic freedom has been challenged for example in USA recently, and these reforms could potentially both empower and challenge a cognitive capitalism that is feeding on intensified communication. How the suggested reforms play out depend on the applied research being done and the outcome of wider social struggles in society.