Justice oriented science, open science, and replicable science are overlapping, but they are not the same

I just published a new blog post in which I argue that we need to accept that the ‘open science movement’ actually is not one movement, but several: open science, replicable science, and justice oriented science. And I explain how the software movement reached a similar crossroad back in 1998 when the term ‘open source software’ was coined to create a distance from the social justice focused movement for free (libre) source software.

Comments are welcome, preferably here in the forum where better discussions can take place than on the blog or Twitter.

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Thanks for this very clear explanation of the different movements, Rebecca.

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i think we discussed this somewhat in osm2018. :slight_smile:

i remember saying something like this: science, like other human endeavors, are value-laden. example of primary values:

truth justice freedom beauty etc.

it is up to the particular scientist to choose which value they prioritize first, and depending on context, the order of priority may change.

i remember @jon_tennant then included these values in his future slides as part of the definition of ‘open science’. :slight_smile:

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This is true, when you said that it really spoke to me. Slides 11 and 12 here might be useful: https://figshare.com/articles/The_global_state_of_Open_Science/9807647

@rebecca I managed to include a reference to your post here, just before we submitted it too, as I think we have similar thoughts along these lines: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2kxq8

One question which popped into my head, which I haven’t thought enough about yet, is to what extent is this ‘social justice’ movement, and it’s calls for equity, inclusivity, diversity etc. actually really just more deeply about freedom. And they just haven’t reached that understanding yet.

In which case, we actually do have a striking parallel between open/free in both science and software. Pragmatism and a social movement.