Introduction: Traceable Science
Let us begin with a hypothetical example: in Germany, the default rule for organ donation could be changed. At present, no one is an organ donor unless they explicitly consent to organ donation (for example, by ordering an organ donor card). Under the proposed new system, everyone would still be free to decide, even after the change, whether or not they want to donate their organs. As in Austria, the alternative would be an opt-out solution, meaning that everyone is by default an organ donor1 and must actively object to that status in order to opt out.
The basis for such a hypothetical political decision would be a scientific finding: under the opt-out solution, the proportion of organ donors is higher than when people have to actively pursue the status of “organ donor.” The original finding was reported by Johnson and Goldstein (2003). Almost 20 years later, Chandrashekar et al. (2023) were able to demonstrate the finding again using newly collected data – in other words, to replicate it. All information about the replication can be read online, and its results are fully accessible online. Using free software, anyone can recalculate and check everything that an independent person has already done on behalf of the journal in which the results were published. Moreover, the effect holds not only for organ donation but for all kinds of other human decisions. The general phenomenon is called the default effect. The scientific basis for the political decision is, in this case, verifiable and traceable.
The transparency of the scientific finding is clearly evident in this example. Unfortunately, though, this is not representative of science as a whole. Research findings often cannot simply be looked up; instead, research reports must be purchased from journals (or requested from the authors by email), data must be requested, and results can only be recalculated using expensive software. This kind of openness plays a particularly important role at present: there is widespread skepticism toward science (Sultan et al., 2024), and political decisions about heating, vaccination, nutrition, or mobility rely on science while simultaneously being perceived as wrong, costly, or threatening. Misleading or simply false information is spread, and people use artificial intelligence (large language models) that are based on potentially false information and are not able to indicate the origin of that information.
How the openness of science is changing, what researchers around the world are doing to open up science, and what proposed solutions are being discussed and implemented in this regard is the subject of this book. An overview of the dimensions of openness, based on Silveira et al. (2023), is given in the table below. Many academic disciplines lie somewhere between the extremes of “classical scholarship” and “open scholarship.” The latter represents the ideal – that is, the state that would be most beneficial for scientific progress.
| Dimension | Classical Science | Open Science |
|---|---|---|
| Open Access | Research articles and books must be purchased or borrowed. | Research articles and books are freely available online. |
| Open materials and data | Materials and data underlying reported scientific findings are not shared, shared only on request, or shared only after considerable delay. | Materials and data are published together with the research report. |
| Open evaluation of researchers, universities, and journals | Research is evaluated on the basis of opaque and manipulable metrics. | Research is evaluated on the basis of objective criteria closely tied to scholarly quality assurance. |
| Open teaching | Acquiring knowledge is costly and requires being present at specific places at specific times. | Teaching materials and courses are freely available online, teaching is (also) conducted online, and care is taken to make materials low-barrier and accessible. |
| Open innovation, “Big Team Science” | Groups of researchers work in strong competition, isolated from one another, on similar problems. | Researchers cooperate internationally and across disciplines and pool resources. |
| Open infrastructure | In everyday research, researchers depend on funding for software or publication fees. | The processes of research and quality assurance are independent of commercial publishers and are organized independently and sustainably by researchers and universities themselves. |
| Citizen science / participatory science | Public participation in science is of secondary importance. | Members of the public are actively involved in the research process and enrich science. |
| Open scientific discourse | Scientific criticism is taken as personal criticism, harms one’s academic career, and results in personal retaliation. Peer reviews of scientific articles are anonymous, are not credited as scientific output, and are visible only to a few people. Comments on research articles are rare and published only after a long delay. | A culture of appreciative and constructive engagement with error prevails; reviews are public and anonymous only on request. Scientific articles can be commented on within minutes. |
| Replication research | New studies must investigate new questions. Studies that re-examine things already demonstrated are not published: failed replication attempts are assumed to reflect methodological problems, while successful replications are considered uninformative. | Past findings are questioned, and independent researchers attempt to demonstrate them again using new data – that is, to replicate them. Journals publish these replication attempts regardless of their outcome. |
References
In the German-language original of this book, the decision to use gender-inclusive asterisk notation (e.g., Organspender*in) instead of the generic masculine form is based on the scientific finding that this better achieves the goal of addressing people of different genders equally (Brohmer et al., 2024). English does not carry the same grammatical gender distinctions as German, so this consideration does not apply in the same way to the English text; throughout this translation, gender-neutral terms such as “organ donor” are used instead.↩︎