Open Access: A Remedy to the Crisis in Scientific Inquiry?

Abstract

This chapter examines the framing of the science system as in a series of crises and argues that the source of most, if not all, of them are governed by what can be described as the normativity crisis. This crisis is characterized by the researcher’s quest for high-ranking journals, a quest that shifts the goalposts from solid and rigour science to mere publishing in the right journals. This development is due to both formal and informal research evaluation, which is the basis for tenure, promotion and grants. It is further argued that the remedy in the form of Open Science and Open Access in particular, comes with limitations: even if all academic outlets flipped to Open Access, the current use of journals as a proxy for quality would still skew science. In addition, the current scheme of evaluation is blocking the transition to Open Access. For Open Access to become the norm in academic publishing and in alignment with the Mertonian norms, the evaluation scheme must change and incentivize Open Science.