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7.4.1Five schools of thought in Open Science

The Open Science movement is a broad phenomenon, consisting of different foci and patterns of argumentation. Fecher and Friesike (2014) distinguish between five schools of thought relating to Open Science: the infrastructural school, the public school, the measurement school, the democratic school, and the pragmatic school. Each of these schools starts from different assumptions and involves different groups of stakeholders.

  1. The first school Fecher and Friesike (2014) propose, the public school, is focused on making science more accessible to the public. Technological innovations allow for a closer interaction between the public and researchers, for example through citizen science, or by making the results of scientific research more comprehensible to broader audiences.
  2. The second school, the democratic school, aims at making research results freely accessible through Open Access, as well as Open Data, Open Code etc. Virtually any part of the research cycle can be made public.
  3. The third school is the pragmatic school and aims at making science more efficient. This can be done through opening up the closed research cycle by creating more opportunities for collaborations between different actors (e.g., collaboration between academics and businesses on research projects). The development of online tools creates opportunities for enhancing collaboration between science and different societal stakeholders.
  4. The infrastructure school is mainly concerned with the technical requirements of Open Science, and thus runs as an undercurrent throughout the Open Science movement.
  5. Lastly, the measurement school aims at finding new ways of measuring the impact of scientific research. The focus here is on altmetrics.

The division into different schools of thought highlights that there are various stakeholders who each provide a different interpretation of the broader concept of Open Science. Most people may primarily associate Open Science with the democratic school, but the discourse surrounding Open Science takes on many forms.

This dossier focuses on Open Access and Open Peer review. While Open Access is strongly aligned with the democratic school, Open Peer Review involves aspects of multiple schools, particularly the democratic school (opening up peer review reports as a research product in their own right) and pragmatic school (access to the peer review process can help researchers better understand the strengths and weaknesses of a publication). Some incarnations of Open Peer Review involve comments by a broader audience; these are also related to the public school.