There are some words and phrases that seem to evade the normal processes of lexicographic assessment: they turn out to have many meanings. One of them is “open science”. Many people and groups use the phrase, but do they agree what is meant? The problem with such terms is that they represent a kind of shorthand for a cluster of ideas.; there is the expectation that we all know what is being referred to. Unfortunately, on examination, that cluster turns out to mean many different things.
I can state there is confusion with some authority, having just spent three hours in a workshop at the Researcher to Reader Conference 2025, entitled “What is our shared definition of pragmatic open science?”. The participants were many and varied, and certainly represented a wide range of stakeholders; they comprised publishers, librarians, intermediaries, funders, and societies. Yet, the group failed to reach its stated goal, of creating a single “pragmatic” definition.
The group’s starting point was the UNESCO definition of open science (2023):
Open science is a set of principles and practices that aim to make scientific research from all fields accessible to everyone for the benefits of scientists and society as a whole.
One participant criticized this definition as an aspiration rather than a statement, but it looked otherwise reasonably watertight. By stating “the principles and practices”, the definition leaves open the specifics of what they are, and how they might change over time.
Everything started well; the attendees broke into five groups, one for each stakeholder type, and were asked to come up with a definition for that group. However, I didn’t see any clear, usable definitions from any of the groups.
The problem appeared to be capturing the thinking behind open science.
It seemed to me that each group attempted to incorporate all the liberal ideas of what they aspired to in scholarly communication, of what made them feel comfortable about the publishing process. They were not satisfied with a simple definition. I would have thought an even simpler statement than the UNESCO version might suffice:
Open science is the public availability of scholarly research and outputs.
Clearly this refers to a state, rather than a process, and many of the participants were unhappy about that limitation. They stated, perhaps with justification, that it wasn’t possible to separate the result from the way that result was achieved. One participant stated we needed to include a “who” and a “why” together with the “what”. More and more topics emerged that people felt relevant, including impact, culture, sustainability, equity, infrastructure, collaboration, and trust. The librarians group, of which I was a member, stated that open science (which they loosely correlated with open access) came about because of the need for compliance with funder mandates.
While these ideas are fascinating, I couldn’t help feeling they were incidental to the core definition. Many of them were aspirations, rather than statements. One participant stated “it’s simply science done well”. That kind of summed up the situation. “Science done well” is something we can all agree on, but of course it may mean completely different things to different people. There were some attempts at clarification. Rick Anderson pointed out the difference between binary terms, such as “public” or “private”, and terms with a scale, such as “accessible”. Perhaps one of the challenges is the increasing lack of trust in scholarly publishing. An author might make their data available, but unintelligible to any outsider: is this open science?
Digging a bit deeper, differences between geographical regions were evident, as well as differences between subject domains. Even the terminology changes here: Open Science is not a term that humanists feel comfortable with; they prefer “open scholarship”.
So the result of the workshop was no definition, just a word-cloud. Could it have been better? I can’t help feeling that the simple definition, although it lacks details of how the result it achieved, has the advantage of being measurable. One participant suggested our discussion was an example of David Hume’s Is-ought problem: it is not easy to move from descriptive to prescriptive statements.
To give just one example of the limitations of the word cloud, let’s remember that not all scholarship is the result of collaboration. The history Eamon Duffy, whose The Voices of Morebath (2001) is a study of one famous sixteenth-century manuscript, the churchwarden accounts from a tiny village in Devon. The author used a published version of the original manuscript, but went back to the original manuscript, working alone. So the underlying data was already, I think, publicly available, and the result of the research was published as a commercial monograph. If the book had been published under Open Access, would that constitute open science? Of course it would, and yet this scholarly output comprised no collaboration,
Perhaps it would be a different group discussion, but perhaps it would be better to agree what can be measured, as with the simple definition above, and separately, to consider practical measures to achieve it. Those practical measures are of course a vast topic, but we would be separating measurable from feeling good. Just feeling we are doing the right thing, “science done right”, is not sufficiently clear.
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