Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Open Science doesn’t stop at the scientific community: a final part of making science more transparent is to open it to the general public. After all, the Mertonian norm of communalism, which emphasises the shared ownership of scientific findings, captures an important truth: a huge chunk of science is funded by taxpayer money. Most journals charge anyone who doesn’t have a subscription something close to $35 for access to an individual paper. It seems problematic and even undemocratic that members of the public, who’ve funded scientific research through their taxes, should be charged to access the results of that research. Of course, there are many things that the taxpayer funds to which they don’t have access, and shouldn’t: for example, the secret patrol routes of the submarines that form the UK’s continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent. Like the sensitive data on viruses we saw above, however, this kind of information is an exception. Most governments have now passed Freedom of Information Acts that allow members of the public to access their documents and statistics; in the United States, the work of all government employees is automatically in the public domain.64 The branch of Open Science that tries to bring science closer to this free-information default is the Open Access movement. Its impact is already obvious: many journals have begun allowing scientists to pay a fee upon publication that lets their paper be downloaded by anyone, in perpetuity, at no cost. Paying t...