open science | Platypus

Swimming Against the Current: Navigating Distrust in Open Science

 Valerie Berseth  December 17, 2024

This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. On a cool autumn day in Vancouver, I took my car, a warm coffee tumbler in hand, and drove into the woods to witness the return of salmon to their spawning grounds. I followed highways and dirt roads to the Adams River, where dense forest meets fast-moving water. I was there for the Salute to the Sockeye—a festival that gathers people from all walks of life every four years, when sockeye salmon are returning in the largest numbers of their four-year life cycle. Every year, salmon return after spending two to three years in the ocean navigating past rocks, hungry bears, eagles, fishing hooks, and even waterfalls. They push forward bit by bit, against the odds, to reach the precise place they were born where they spawn and die. Scientists don’t fully understand how salmon navigate this long, upstream journey, but we know they rely on subtle cues from the earth’s magnetic fields and the river’s chemistry to guide them home. (read more...)

Common(s) in Science and Technology? Dispatches from the SEEKCommons Network

 Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Matias Milia  December 17, 2024

 Listen to a reading of this post.

This is the Introduction post to our new SEEKCommons series. The posts in this series are forthcoming, and will be linked here in this Introduction as they are published over the next several months. What does the “common(s)” mean for the present and future of science and technology? Are there novel dynamics at play in how knowledge infrastructures are being built, controlled, and contested today? It is with the goal of exploring these interconnected questions that we conceived of the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) network—a collective platform where the “common” stands as a political horizon for collaborative social, technical, and environmental work. (read more...)

Open Science and the Ambivalence of the Digital Economy

 Alessandro Delfanti  July 30, 2013

What does sharing mean in contemporary science? New practices of open science are questioning assumptions about the evolution of scientific cultures. Often, references to the emergence of new forms of open sharing and cooperation through digital networks point at the restoration of a modern scientific ethos of sharing and communalism to which scientists are somehow naturally socialised. Yet I believe scientific cultures are the subject of a cultural mash-up. This includes cultural elements taken from the modern, Mertonian ethos of science that preceded the late 20th century transformation towards academic capitalism and post-academic science. Elements coming from that tradition are still at scientists’ disposal, since the influence of that culture has survived the social dimension from which it was born, but they need to remix it with new and different cultural elements directly related to computers and information technologies, which are indistricable from today’s scientific enterprise. An old culture that is pre-existing, accepted, (read more...)