Open science: human emancipation or bureaucratic serfdom?

Abstract

Open science is not a particularly novel idea: disclosing science to expose it to a public scrutiny is among the deeds of the modern science revolution. Neither is new the unbalance between science - the living craftsmanship of a knowledge community - and its alleged embodiment in textual objects: the scope of written papers is so wide in space and time that they can be adopted as knowledge proxies. Such a question, in fact, is as ancient as Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus. Accordingly, open science can be understood in two different - and not necessarily congruent - meanings: (1) as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation among people; (2) as a management model that might also be aimed to the exploitation of open research texts and data for the sake of the market. Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would not be - administratively - difficult to add an open science mandate to the researchers' burden of duties. Philosophically, however, we have to ask not only why open science, today, needs to be mandated, but, above all, whether (open) science can be mandated. The application of a Kantian thought experiment to a vindication of the Italian State assessment of research attempted by one of its former functionaries helps us to show that: 1. open science needs to be mandated because it is not open any longer; 2. the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is not determined by the will to knowledge any longer, but by economic and political powers.