Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

RRI promotes a forward-looking responsibility for which the future is qualitatively different from the present. Open Science supports a restricted view of responsibility in which the future is an empty space waiting to be filled. The talk critically compares the futures of the two policies.

Paper long abstract

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a science governance framework supported by the European Commission’s (EC) funding program Horizon2020 (2013-2020). RRI promotes an expanded conception of social responsibility for science, which goes beyond harm prevention and can be described as a form of ‘remedial responsibility’. Both preventionist and remedial responsibility are kinds of forward-looking responsibilities (as opposed to the backward-looking, post hoc assignment of blame and punishment). However, they rely on different conceptions of the future. Specifically, the kind of responsibility promoted by RRI require a future that is not qualitatively indistinguishable from the present, like an ‘empty’ reality waiting to be filled with the passing of time. Instead, it requires a form of ‘lived future’, in which many things (i.e., our value systems) may be qualitatively different from the present.

With the transition to the new funding program, HorizonEurope (2021-2027), reference to ‘responsibility’ in research and innovation has disappeared and EC now supports Open Science (OS). OS does not seem to require the kind of critical and future-oriented reflection necessary to social responsibility. Furthermore, OS seems to reduce scientists’ responsibility to the production and diffusion of knowledge (‘epistemic responsibility’), which requires only an ‘empty’ conception of the future.

In this talk, I reconstruct the shift from RRI to OS and I diagnose the main problems with the new overall governance strategy of the EC.