Abstract
When I teach science communication to natural science students, one of the things I tell them is that science communication is nothing new. Science has always been public, in differing ways, since its earliest instantiations.
Last time I did this, one student had a question. Surely, he said, science was not always public? What about alchemists, who closely guarded their knowledge and operated in much secrecy? What about today’s technological industries, which similarly guard their knowledge, albeit in the form of patents rather than recipes for making gold? Indeed, what about mundane labwork, where one is constantly concerned not to get pipped to the post in publishing new findings and may therefore keep the details of those findings quiet?
Of course, this student was quite right. Science has always been public, but it has also always not been public. Publicity is one of the constitutive notions of modern science, and transparency and the possibility of replication remain integral to both formal and informal standards for good science. But it is not hard to think of instances where openness is framed as an impossible or even undesirable ideal for actual scientific practice (the Manhattan Project, animal research, industrial R&D).
Science and the Politics of Openness turns on this central tension. It explores case studies of (efforts to enhance) transparency and openness in science, but in doing so, it also discusses their inverse: moments where science and science policy are closed, private, protected from wider public scrutiny.
One of the volume’s central contributions is thus to make clear that, despite the widespread assumption that ‘to be open is to be good’ (as Barbara Prainsack and Sabina Leonelli write in their chapter), notions such as ‘openness’ are never straightforward. In digging down into particular case studies – open science initiatives, processes for risk management, policy on animal testing – the volume shows that openness is always specific. Open to whom? On whose terms? And to what ends?
The volume falls into four discrete – albeit somewhat arbitrary – sections: Transparency, Responsibility, Expertise, and Faith. Part of its value is the range of perspectives it offers on what we might call, in the words of contributors John Holmwood and Jan Balon, ‘the problem of democratic knowledge’ in contemporary societies. The book examines many of the central issues that science and technology studies (STS) have been gnawing on over the last years, and which are in their different ways concerned with the openness or accessibility of science: public engagement and participation, democratisation of science and science policy, the nature of (lay) expertise, responsible research and innovation.
I particularly enjoyed Stephen Curry on the recent history of open access publishing, Carmen M. McLeod on the complex negotiations involved in opening up animal research, Roda Madziva and Vivian Lowndes on who decides what counts as ‘evidence’, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw arguing for the virtues of ambiguity in experiments in participation, and Judith Tsouvalis on the transformation of ash dieback into a do-able, and thereby highly delimited, policy problem. These cases are engagingly and thoughtfully written; indeed, the volume as a whole is generally a highly pleasurable read.
But I also see the book’s emphasis on – and repeated demonstrations of – openness and transparency as things that are done, rather than unproblematically good qualities that should be promoted, as important. Here the analytical heart is the section on responsibility, and section introductions written by Benjamin Worthy (chapter 1) and Barbara Prainsack and Sabina Leonelli (chapter 5). Both Worthy and Prainsack and Leonelli are clear that openness has become accepted as a ‘universal good’; both, also, suggest that ‘institutions . . . remake transparency in their own image’.
By taking openness as an object of study, rather than an ideal to be attained, they – and other authors in the volume – are able to unpack what is happening when people talk about or promote values of openness or participation in particular cases, while casting some critical light on the democratic implications of these instantiations of ‘openness’.
We might therefore understand Science and the Politics of Openness as opening up openness. Ideas of transparency and openness, write Prainsack and Leonelli, ‘can be interpreted in many different ways, and yet each interpretation can work to the benefit or at the expense of others’. Science is never only public and never only closed off from the world. The trick is to see how its publicness is organised in particular contexts – and whose voices, and agency, are opened up or closed down by this.
Finally, it is worth noting that the editors have, fittingly, ensured that the volume is freely available as an e-publication (at www.manchesterhive.com).