Open Science’s Role in the Implementation of Private-Public Collaborations in the Montreal’s AI Ecosystem

• In Event: Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Epistemic Values, Practices & Assets - III

Abstract

We aim to demonstrate how the engagement of corporations such as Google and Facebook toward Open Science allows for a better co-optation of university researchers specialized in machine learning. Increasingly, scientists are adopting a “dual affiliation model”, a new form of institutional collaboration where researchers are allowed to keep their professorship while working part-time for their new corporate employers. When challenged, this novel arrangement is systematically justified by the commitment of the concerned corporations toward symbolically-loaded principles: for instance, research produced by all scientists is free to be published, thus also legitimizing collaboration as a further intertwining of private and public interests (Lave et al., 2010).
Via the analysis of media material and of our own interviews with machine learning specialists in Montreal (n=12), we want to establish 1) what task the commitment of corporate actors toward Open Science and the related dual-affiliation model accomplishes in respect to the long-term sustainability of the local ecosystem and 2) how this arrangement can ultimately be seen as relatively limited compared to the justificatory value it is being given. The resulting consolidation of the central position of industrial actors in the AI field might indeed be interpreted as a re-regulatory “rollout” phase of the “actually existing neoliberalization of science” (Peck et al., 2018 ; Mirowski 2011). This new institutional setting finally entails potential reconfigurations of the basic and applied research dichotomy as well as a dephasing of the “modèle québecois” developed by the province over the last 50+ years.

Authors

• Marius Senneville, Institut national de la recherche scientifique

• Jonathan Roberge, Institut national de la recherche scientifique