Prototypes for Openness: Platforming Non-Commercial Open Science Infrastructures

• In Event: The Invisible Aspects of Digital Infrastructure

Abstract

At a small but influential nonprofit in North America, politics and practice are matters of platforming. Open source web software developers, metascience researchers, and open science marketer/evangelists-working in the same open office space-collaboratively engineer social prototypes-technical assemblages designed to repair sociality (Turner 2016). A free and open-source workflow management platform, preprint servers, reproducibility studies, and carefully curated community relationships are all created to (re)align the routine practices of researchers with Mertonian values of transparency and data-sharing.

Over the course of three months, I gathered stories of Open Science platforming. I asked employees to connect their stories to the meanings and significance of various technical minutiae (embedded in, outside, and between software), examining the subtle but meaningful ways they figure in crafting alternative possibilities for research and experimentation. I participant-observed in several design meetings and impromptu discussions, sat in during paired code reviews, and had many informal conversations during the workday and after hours.

In this paper, I explore a concern with "platforming" to underscore what STS scholars have described as contingent possibilities of becoming-with technical things. I argue that, while their institutional mission is designed in relation to generic categories of research practice (i.e. shifting Science, rather than specific disciplines), their strategies resist epistemic foreclosure; they remain committed to multiplicity, flexibility, and modularity. Finally, I explore the infrastructural (including ideological) difficulties of bringing non-commercial research sharing platforms "to scale" in the midst of extractive appropriations of openness and epistemic uncertainty by rent-seeking commercial/predatory journals and reactionary politicians.

Author

• Kyle Harp-Rushing, University of California, Riverside