Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Startseite

For registration please send an email directly to Sven Ulpts via: su@ps.au.dk

Online participation will be an option. Please indicate at registration if you wish to participate on-site or virtually.

Deadline for registrations is Sunday, May 10th 2026.

 

Within a decade, Open Science (OS) reforms have moved from the fringes of scientific discourse to the forefront of scientific practice and public policy. Scientists, universities, publishers, and funders have rapidly adopted the idea(l)s of open science: data sharing, open access, preregistration, registered reports, and replication have become rewarded or even mandatory in many fields. This rapid and ongoing reform is often portrayed as the success of an earnest scientific grass-roots effort towards a better, more democratic, and inclusive ‘Scientific Utopia’ (Crespo López et al., 2025; Nosek & Bar-Anan, 2012; Nosek et al., 2012; Uhlmann et al., 2019).

However, more recent observations suggest that this narrative might need some critical re-evaluation, since the movement might have never been exclusively grass-roots driven, but rather astroturfed to a certain degree. Primarily, through the direct involvement of extremely powerful non-academic actors in the form of venture capitalists and political institutions, which provided seed funding to integral OS organisations and infrastructure, thus potentially exerting direct influence on them and their agenda-setting (Bartscherer & Reinhart, 2025). Other reasons can be seen in the claimed, but also contested, link between OS and neoliberalism (Hostler, 2024; Mirowski, 2018, 2023; Uygun Tunç et al., 2023) as well as, more generally speaking, the role of OS as a catalyst for the commercialisation of science (Fernández Pinto, 2020), the high profits large commercial publishers make with Open Access formats (see e.g. Butler et al., 2023) or the financial mechanisms of exclusion and inequality linked to OS (see e.g., Nkoudou 2020; Ràfols, 2025; Ulpts et al., 2025). Each of these factors raise questions about whether Open Science is improving science or simply adding a new coat of transparency-tinted paint. 

Answering this question requires reconciling these diffuse observations to clarify the political and financial backdrop of (Open) science reform. What are the agenda-setting goals of private investors and political actors? How have these come to influence and shape OS and science more broadly?

We take this as an opportunity to collectively explore these matters and brainstorm about how to investigate and address these issues surrounding science reform.

In the planned workshop we would therefore like to ask: Who funds OS? Who benefits from OS financially? How do private and political interests work against the proclaimed idea(l)s of OS? What examples of ‘OS backsliding’ can we identify already? What is the interaction between OS implementations in research policy — for instance in the form of Open Innovation agendas (Heimstädt & Friesike, 2021; Lund, 2025) — and the financial realities of OS?

 

 

To start off the workshop, Sheena F. Bartscherer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, DE) will critically examine (unwanted) fraternisation attempts from non-academic actors towards the Open Science community. Particularly from those who some have characterised as techno-feudalists or neo-fascists. With venture capitalists, such as Arnold Ventures or Convergent Research, as well as the far-right AfD in Germany or the Trump administration in the USA, we observed multiple cases in recent years of private as well as political actors seeking close association with the Open Science movement, despite their opposing views on core Open Science values such as democracy, sustainability, equity, diversity, and inclusion. Begging the questions as to what these radical political and private actors see in Open Science (that we might not) and what this could imply for the future of the Open Science movement.

 

The talk will be followed by Arwid Lund (Södertörn University, SE), whose presentation analyses Open Science as a political policy project for economic strength and hegemony that is closely related to the current cognitive phase of capitalism. It presents an alternative form of Open Science that could counteract the negative effects of the current commodification and unbundling of academia.

 

 

 

Afterwards, Alejandra Manco Vega (Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) will explore what the academic literature says about Open Science policies and what researchers themselves actually say when asked directly about these policies. In her talk she will bring together two studies to examine the gap between Open Science policy as documented in the existing literature and as understood and practised by researchers in the natural sciences.

 

 

Our last talk of the first day will be by Petra Gehring (Technische Universität Darmstadt, DE) she will reflect on how, for some time now, science policymakers and research funders have been discussing ‘Diamond Open Access’ as a potential solution to a wide range of problems, while OA activists promote a “public stack” in order to free academic publishing from dependence on Elsevier & Co. This refers to publishing via libraries, accompanied, of course – and to a greater or lesser extent, mandatorily – by the use of Creative Commons licences. The talk will critically examine the contradictions inherent in this supposed solution and outline possible alternatives.

 

 

We end our first workshop day with a fishbowl discussion to reflect on the content of the day and together explore the Paradox of Openness. 

 

 

The second day will begin with a talk from María de los Ángeles Crespo López (Vrije Universiteit, NL). In her talk she will analyse how Open Science is framed in national and international policies and guidance documents aimed at researchers. Drawing on a scoping review and critical discourse analysis, she will discuss the conflicting discourses these documents promote about the goals of Open Science as well as the Eurocentric priorities and colonial assumptions about knowledge and scientific progress that many of them reproduce.

 

The talk will be followed by Sven Ulpts (Aarhus University, DK), who will provide a historical comparison of the emergence of research integrity and Open Science, as research policy issues. He will highlight how research integrity entered science through political interventions into scientific self-regulation and in reaction to publicised cases of research misconduct in the US, while Open Science is often presented as a scientific movement that gained momentum in the 2010s following several crisis declarations in the social and biomedical sciences. In the end, he will discuss how Open Science and research integrity converge or diverge in current discourse and practices of Good Science.  

 

Nicole Foti (Stanford University, US) will follow this talk, tracing the emergence of collective action to apply Open Science to the research and making of drugs. She shows how ‘open’ is defined and operationalised in particular ways, prioritising public data sharing of early research (which may later be privatised) over such interventions as public clinical trials and commercialisation, raising the question of where, when, and for whom openness is beneficial.

 

Lastly, Osvaldo Gallardo (National University of Cuyo, AR) will explore the context of the rise and general adoption of article processing charges (APCs) over the last decade and the varying impacts they had on central and peripheral countries. In his presentation he will analyse, from a qualitative perspective, the current practices and near-future expectations of scholars working in Argentina, a country deeply affected by budget cuts in recent years. He will also compare the situation in Argentina
with that in other countries (Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa).

 

We will end the second day of the workshop with collaborative work sessions reflecting on the last two days, culminating in another fishbowl discussion to explore and scrutinise the futures of Open Science.

We invite scholars of all career stages interested in these dimensions of OS as well as those curious about studying the mechanisms behind science reform more broadly, to attend this workshop. Everyone, whether critical or enthusiastic about Open Science reform, is invited and welcome to join!

 

 

References

Bartscherer, S. F., & Reinhart, M. (2025). The (Non)Academic Community Forming around Replications: Mapping the International Open Science space via its Replication Initiatives. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.16761919

Butler, L.-A., Matthias, L., Simard, M.-A., Mongeon, P., & Haustein, S. (2023). The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(4), 778–799. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

Crespo López, M. D. L. Á., Pallise Perello, C., De Ridder, J., & Labib, K. (2025). Open Science as Confused: Contradictory and Conflicting Discourses in Open Science Guidance to Researchers. MetaArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/zr35u_v3

Elliott, S., & Sterner, B. (2025). How Open Science organizations generate epistemic oppression. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 15(3), 47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-025-00674-0

Fernández Pinto, M. (2020). Open Science for private Interests? How the Logic of Open Science Contributes to the Commercialization of Research. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics, 5, 588331. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2020.588331

Heimstädt, M., & Friesike, S. (2021). The odd couple: Contrasting openness in innovation and science. Innovation, 23(3), 425–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/14479338.2020.1837631

Hostler, T. J. (2024). Open Research Reforms and the Capitalist University: Areas of Opposition and Alignment. Collabra: Psychology, 10(1), 121383. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.121383

Lund, A. (2025). An alternative open science framework. Journal of Documentation, 81(7), 157–178. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-09-2024-0220

Manco, A. (2022). A landscape of open science policies research. Sage Open, 12(4), 21582440221140358. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221140358

Mirowski, P. (2018). The future(s) of open science. Social Studies of Science, 48(2), 171–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718772086

Mirowski, P. (2023). The Evolution of Platform Science. Social Research: An International Quarterly, 90(4), 725–755. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2023.a916352

Nkoudou, T. H. M. (2020). Epistemic Alienation in African Scholarly Communications: Open Access as a Pharmakon. In M. P. Eve & J. Gray (Eds.), Reassembling Scholarly Communications (pp. 25–40). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.003.0006

Nosek, B. A., Spies, J. R., & Motyl, M. (2012a). Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 615–631. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612459058

Nosek, B. A., Spies, J. R., & Motyl, M. (2012b). Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6), 615–631. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612459058

Ràfols, I. (2025, March 14). Rethinking Open Science: Towards Care for Equity and Inclusion. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org//articles/rethinking-open-science-towards-care-for-equity-and-inclusion

Uhlmann, E. L., Ebersole, C. R., Chartier, C. R., Errington, T. M., Kidwell, M. C., Lai, C. K., McCarthy, R. J., Riegelman, A., Silberzahn, R., & Nosek, B. A. (2019). Scientific Utopia III: Crowdsourcing Science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(5), 711–733. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691619850561

Ulpts, S., Bartscherer, S. F., Penders, B., & Nelson, N. (2025). Epistemic oligarchies: Capture and concentration through science reform. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.17177017

Uygun Tunç, D., Tunç, M. N., & Eper, Z. B. (2023). Is Open Science Neoliberal? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(5), 1047–1061. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221114835