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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore how open science is established as a mode of valuation through the interplay between novel digital platforms on the one hand, and specific modes of interpretation (that is, material practices of ordering knowledge) on the other.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore how open science is established as a mode of valuation for scientific output through the interplay between novel digital platforms (and their metric traces) on the one hand, and specific modes of interpretation (that is, material practices of ordering knowledge) on the other. The efforts of communicating science to novel audiences have not only been fostered through the scholarly community, but have also been taken up and triggered by novel digital platforms which harvest data about how certain pieces of scholarly communication have been taken up by other societal audiences. I argue that the socio-political significance of these novel "open" digital communication channels rests on how they are interpreted in scholarly and political discourse and the ways through which they interact. Based on studies into the scholarly discourses of science communication in scientometrics and informetrics I aim to show that metric artefacts of scholarly digital platforms resonate well within regimes of scholarly interpretation that establish correlations as a guiding epistemic practice for ordering and classifying channels of communication. The scholarly and scientometric discourse on novel media channels, however, has not only its own logics, but reaches significance as it corresponds to concurrent figures of argumentation in the socio-political organization of science and science policy in which quantified descriptions of digital media channels become closely associated with what is regarded as the societal impact of science.