Abstract
Open Science holds the promise to make scientific endeavours more inclusive, participatory, understandable, accessible and re-usable for large audiences. However, making processes open will not per se drive wide reuse or participation unless also accompanied by the capacity (in terms of knowledge, skills, financial resources, technological readiness and motivation) to do so. These capacities vary considerably across regions, institutions and demographics. Those advantaged by such factors will remain potentially privileged, putting Open Science's agenda of inclusivity at risk of propagating conditions of ‘cumulative advantage’. With this paper, we systematically scope existing research addressing the question: ‘What evidence and discourse exists in the literature about the ways in which dynamics and structures of inequality could persist or be exacerbated in the transition to Open Science, across disciplines, regions and demographics?’ Aiming to synthesize findings, identify gaps in the literature and inform future research and policy, our results identify threats to equity associated with all aspects of Open Science, including Open Access, Open and FAIR Data, Open Methods, Open Evaluation, Citizen Science, as well as its interfaces with society, industry and policy. Key threats include: stratifications of publishing due to the exclusionary nature of the author-pays model of Open Access; potential widening of the digital divide due to the infrastructure-dependent, highly situated nature of open data practices; risks of diminishing qualitative methodologies as ‘reproducibility’ becomes synonymous with quality; new risks of bias and exclusion in means of transparent evaluation; and crucial asymmetries in the Open Science relationships with industry and the public, which privileges the former and fails to fully include the latter.
Highlights
We aim to systematically scope existing research to answer the question: ‘What evidence and discourse exists in the literature about the ways in which dynamics and structures of inequality could persist or be exacerbated in the transition to Open Science, across disciplines, regions and demographics?’ Our scope includes all aspects of Open Science, including Open Access, Open Data, FAIR Data, Open Methods, Open Evaluation and Citizen Science, as well as its interactions with the interfaces between science and society and industry
Since the many potential benefits of Open Science have been well-argued elsewhere [43,44,45,46], our presentation here necessarily focuses in greater depth on those areas where Open Science implementation potentially endangers the aim of greater equity in science
The following sections present our synthesis of this literature
Summary
The Global North dominates authorship and collaborative research networks, pushing the Global South to the periphery [1,2]. Lack of equity has been found to shut out participation in the scientific conversation and potentially reduce motivation, happiness and willingness to work, even among those who benefit [10]. These inequalities undoubtedly testify to broader societal imbalances but, as observed since the 1960s [11], dynamics of social mobility play out in academia in specific ways (cf [12])
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