Placing Humans at the Centre of Open Research

Efforts to produce standards, guidelines, technologies and infrastructures that may boost sharing practices in science have resulted in great advances over the last few decades. However, they have also unintentionally boosted a technocratic, object-oriented vision of open research that is easy to appropriate for “open washing” and does not do justice to the very efforts of the humans at the heart of such work. The result is an open research landscape that fosters, rather than mitigate, existing inequities and divides in the production and use of scientific research. This talk reflects on the requirement of keeping social agency at the heart of open research practice, and what it means for the future development of policies, tools and services.