Short Abstract:

Open Science has become the dominant model for knowledge production with incentives, policies and platforms advocating for Open Access and Open Research Data. But who controls, profits from, or possibly misuses this knowledge? What does this mean for anthropological ethics?

Long Abstract:

Open Science has become the paradigm for academic Western knowledge production. Science policy makers, research funding agencies, universities and museums are strongly advocating the cause for Open Research Data and Open Access publications. Researchers are hoping for a broader circulation of their ideas. Platforms and online-archives are becoming the standard for knowledge production and circulation. Humanities and social sciences are put under pressure to align with publication and data sharing standards originally stemming from STEM disciplines.

At first glance it seems we entered an ideal era of academic knowledge production. Knowledge of and about the world, often produced with public funds, is given back to the world with considerable scope for re-usage.

In which kind of hierarchical and ontological structures, economies, and accompanying technologies (e.g. AI) are these commoning processes entangled? Whose knowledge or property is at stake, who decides about and finances it, who profits from Open Science at the end and who might lose out? Who might (ab)use open knowledge and its tools for what purposes? These issues become especially important for Anthropology, with anthropological knowledge production being concerned with people’s lifeworlds, shared with researchers.

We invite everyone who engages in questions of ‘digital care’: How do forms of consent account for the new distribution and usage systems into which the (data) publications are transformed in the wake of Open Science? What kind of different (moral) economies go along with Open Science in the anthropologies and what are the rules, practices, structures and technologies making them?

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