The governance of open science: A comparative analysis of two open science consortia

Abstract

Recent open science efforts recognize that the efficient, credible, and transparent development of scientific knowledge relies on the capacity to verify and reuse the “intermediate resources” employed throughout the research process, including data, computer code, and other research material. Prior research has shown that the disclosure of such resources is often hindered by the incentives and disincentives perceived by individual scientists. Beyond the level of individual incentives, however, the sharing of intermediate resources is obstructed by the governance norms that inform these incentives in the first place, such as the norms of authorship and evaluation. Thus, our central research question asks how the limitations of the established norms of authorship and evaluation are addressed at the organizational level within open science consortia that are premised on the sharing of intermediate resources. Drawing on qualitative methods, we present an in-depth comparative analysis of two open science consortia–the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)–that illustrates how the limitations of the established norms of authorship and evaluation are navigated in brain and cancer research, respectively. Our findings show that the governance mechanisms designed and implemented in CONP and TCGA reflect two distinct forms of governance, one distributed and the other layered, which are characterized by different understandings of scientific authorship and evaluation. Our study thus contributes to ongoing debates on open science and the governance of scientific collaboration by shedding light on the relationship between governance forms and variable conceptions of authorship and evaluation.