Conceptualising Open Science in the 21st Century

Abstract

Open Science that is adaptive to the complexity of the 21st century is emerging in transdisciplinary institutions outside of academia. Despite its growing popularity and plurality as a movement, the scope in which Open Science is practiced and discussed inside academia is still mostly restricted to the scientific community and fragmented between disciplinary silos. Researchers and policymakers promoting Open Science often focus on knowledge translation and still recognise experts and academia as the main producers of knowledge, essentially closing the research process to non-researchers and preventing other perspectives from being integrated into knowledge production. Our aim with this project was to adopt a systems perspective to understand how Open Science can address the challenges in the current knowledge production system. Open discussions among the team members revealed distinct understandings of what constitutes Open Science. Thus, during our process we collated these many defi nitions of Open Science and extracted the dimensions that underlie such definitions and mapped how these dimensions could be interconnected in a more comprehensive conceptualisation of Open Science. Future iterations of the challenge could build on our reflections and explore how these Open Science dimensions translate into scientific practice and how researchers can be encouraged to reflect on Open Science in a more systems-oriented way. Our findings have been summarised in a small video.