Opening up science as a work: An international comparison of openness to society and openness of publication

by Lucile Ottolini and Marianne Noel

In this article we deliberately adopt a perspective of the sociology of work and of professions: rather than examining discourses on openness, we focus on the missions, experiences, and profiles, as well as the practices, of professionals whose daily work is devoted to ‘opening up’ science. Drawing on the cases of two groups studied in our respective theses – one responsible for opening up their institution to society,[1] the other responsible for opening up publications[2] – our proposal follows the hypothesis of the emergence of a professional category.[3] A reason for a joint analysis of these two case studies is that these openness devices emerged in contexts of contestation of institutional science. This empirical and analytical perspective means that we do not take the ambitions and initiatives of openness (whether publications or institutions) for granted, but rather see them as sociological objects. In total, our empirical material consists of interviews (n=41) and analyses of institutional archives. The data covers a broad period of institutional intervention in France and Sweden (from the early 2000s to late in 2020).

We begin by describing the competencies involved in the work of ‘opening up’ science, as well as the spaces of socialisation in which these professionals find informal or institutional resources to support their actions. How was (or is) the acquisition of these competencies organised?

This analysis leads us to consider the contribution of the comparison between openness to society and openness of publication in science. What common or specific arguments can be made in relation to the two case studies analysed? What generalisations can be made, applicable to other cases of openness? The different relations to ‘open science’ allow for a contrasting analysis of the ways in which openness is operationalised. There is notably a heavy use of quantification by open access publishing professionals, while strategies to boost the credibility of professionals working in the field of openness to society are limited to signing a charter.

Finally, this work makes it possible to analyse the institutional transformations underlying the policies of openness. We conclude with a critical and reflexive examination of current open science strategies, based not only on the trajectories of individuals and collectives but also on practices aimed at making them operational.

Introduction

Context: Openness as a mantra

The last twenty years of open science advocacy and the recent proliferation of programs and funding have shown that open science has become a veritable mantra.[4] It has gained currency as a response either to the crisis of scientific and institutional credibility[5] or to the more systemic limitations encountered in academia. Voiced by higher education and research (HER) institutions, this mantra has been defended by non-profits and NGOs, translated into public policies,[6]and enshrined in national[7] and European laws. It encompasses a variety of initiatives and dimensions, from opening up the institutional governance of institutions to opening up access to scientific articles, research fields, data production and so on.

Injunctions to openness also aim to build bridges between open science and open innovation. The diversity of these initiatives makes it difficult to carry out a comparative analysis; yet such analysis is desirable and necessary to consider the role of openness in the contemporary transformations of technosciences and the supporting communities that surround them.

The various mechanisms for opening up science in HER institutions (whether, as we see in the article, they concern opening up to society or opening up publications) have the common characteristic of emerging in contexts of contestation, controversy, or criticism of ‘institutional’ science.[8] Such situations, where the credibility of scientists is challenged by the society and by their peers, raise a more general question: how do the scientists who are active in collectives anchored in several social worlds build their credibility with their colleagues, particularly the professional communities that help them cope with the changes taking place in their institutions?

The emergence of the mechanisms for opening up science often gives rise to periods of reform and institutional change. In the world of research libraries, the litany of ‘crises’ emerged in the 1990s from the impossibility of paying for journal subscriptions, which had become prohibitive.[9] The schemes for opening up publications and society in the institutions emerged gradually, between the early 1990s and the mid-2010s, over a period of more than two decades. If opening up science is a reform, it is neither a spontaneous reform (i.e. one that originated in the institutions themselves) nor a sudden one.

Openness for credibility

The notion of credibility in academia, particularly its genesis, is examined in-depth by Li Vigni et al.[10] These authors argue that this central notion of Science and Technology Studies (STS) developed to counter essentialist accounts of ‘science’, whether epistemological, historical, or sociological. In their seminal work that became known as ‘laboratory studies’, Latour and Woolgar proposed to understand the quest for credibility as the motor, condition, and product of scientific activity, and introduced the notion of the ‘credibility cycle’ to designate the economic-type process by which scientists earn credits that they can reinvest to finance new scientific activities.[11] A few years later, following his work on the role of social context in the establishment of scientific facts, historian of science Steven Shapin defined scientific knowledge as the set of statements deemed credible by a given collective.[12] As in Latour and Woolgar’s approach, the quest for credibility is consubstantial with scientific activity. Shapin’s definition of credibility is relational, in the sense that credibility is sought in order to reach clearly identified recipients. He sees the attainment of credibility as the result of a multitude of social and cultural practices, the modalities of which are a priori elusive. For Shapin, the study of credibility involves a comparative study of the more or less formalised practices by which it is achieved.

We propose to analyse the opening up of science as a vector of contemporary scientific credibility, implemented by professional communities which are invisible in their daily environment. As Li Vigni et al,[13] we use the notion of vector more broadly than Shapin to refer to any human or non-human entity that can be used to gain credibility. By describing the work of two communities of professionals responsible respectively for 1/ opening up their institution to society and 2/ opening up publication in their institution, we propose not to take the ambitions and initiatives of openness (of publication or to society) for granted, but to see them as an object of investigation for the social sciences. Rather than examining discourses on openness, we focus not only on the missions, experiences, and profiles of professionals whose daily work is devoted to ‘opening up’ science, but also on their practices. This approach allows us to examine the credibility strategies of these two professional groups and to consider the objects, infrastructures, and actors of open science and their practices as vectors of credibility.

Our hypothesis is that these credibility strategies are part of one (of three) of the credibility economies described by Shapin.[14] This economy operates at the interface between experts from different professions and fields, where the explicitness of methods and, in one of the two cases presented, the language of quantification, can be seen as the main vectors of credibility facilitating communication across the boundaries of professional groups.[15] ‘Opening up’ is studied here from a relational perspective; it is understood as making oneself credible at the boundary between different social worlds (whether they be market and non-market worlds) and a community of undifferentiated potential beneficiaries and re-users (‘civil society’ in one case, ‘users’ in the other). We will also present the way in which advocacy or activism contributes to increasing this credibility.

Analytical framework

We deliberately adopt a perspective of the sociology of work and of professions and focus on occupational groups, in the sense understood by Demazière and Gadéa as an evolving, unstable, and open process.[16] Establishing themselves as a professional group requires that they have skills and codes of conduct, that they acquire social and legal recognition, and that they exercise, or even monopolise, one or more activities. These activities are part of a broad system of interactions in which there is constant competition between professions to conquer or retain their ‘jurisdiction’.[17] We examine the professional trajectories of the actors as well as the process of development of new competencies in their day-to-day work of opening up science (by following the difficulties encountered, the place of their work in their institutions, and the strategies they deploy to adapt their work to various constraints, etc). The work is seen here as an indicator of the openness of science (whether it is opening up ‘to society’ or making publications ‘open’, or both).

Provided that we do not adopt an overly didactic definition, and that we depart from the actors’ own definitions, competencies and learning are relevant categories of empirical insight into the openness of science. In an interactionist approach, competencies are understood here as that which actors build their action on in situations of openness, and that enables them to act. Learning is understood as that which allows actors to adapt their participation to action, and this learning can take place in the space of action or in any other social space or situation. The category of learning makes it possible to apprehend competencies in a dynamic perspective and to account for the evolution of actors’ competences in action.[18]

Competencies have additional analytical relevance. Denis Bergmann argues that institutional transformations are enabled by the development of new competencies.[19] Starting with a study of the institutionalisation of economics as a discipline, within a research organisation (INRA), Bergmann shows that this institutionalisation is the result of learning and competencies developed not only by the scientists involved in the discipline, but also by the administration (in the sense of research support activity as defined today). The administration adapts or transforms institutional norms and rules to take this new discipline on board. From such an analytical perspective, identifying, describing, and analysing the professional competencies involved in opening up science makes it possible to test the hypothesis of institutional transformations as vectors of credibility by drawing on different tools and competencies of the actors.

We propose a typology of professional competencies in the opening up of science, according to three distinct categories that underlie the activity of the professionals studied. These three categories are: institutional competencies that help professionals in their quest for institutional transformation; social competencies that equip actors in the creation and animation of networks inside and outside their institutions; and technical competencies that inform the professional legitimacy to build and promote ambitions for openness. With this typology in mind, we analyse the socialisation spaces that contribute to giving greater scope to the work of opening up. Competencies and spaces of socialisation are the resources on which these professionals rely in their day-to-day work.

Finally, this research allows us to analyse the institutional transformations underlying the policies of openness, and once again highlights the ambiguous nature of the communities towards which these policies are directed. As shown by Pierre Delvenne[20] in an article on the development of Responsible Research Innovation (RRI), the communities targeted by openness schemes are poorly defined, including academic communities that do not always mobilise in return, resulting in a lack of mobilisation and significant ‘absenteeism’.[21] [22]

Methodology and data collection

Two distinct research projects inform the proposed reflection, the articulation of which is underpinned by the theoretical and methodological principles of multi-site ethnography initially developed by anthropologist George Marcus,[23] then taken up by many authors.[24] This approach, which emphasises fieldwork in multiple, heterogeneous spaces, proposes to identify a problematic common thread (opening up as a work) that brings together the two case studies.

Considering the ‘openness of science’ as a global object that unfolds in multiple ways around the world, we start from the premise that concrete, empirical practices and experiences help us to better understand processes that are, by definition, diffuse and composite.[25] We focus not only on the movements and evolutions of people, objects, ideas, etc, but also on the tensions and conflicts within these different projects of openness, which can be achieved only by diversifying the points of entry into the field. As Marine Al Dahdah[26] points out, it is a matter not simply of comparing two research objects that might appear similar (‘openness to society’ and ‘openness of publication’), but rather of tracing links, juxtapositions, and connections between different objects and places.

While the conditions of the investigation were not strictly similar (in-depth monographic approach in France, short but regular stays in Sweden), the two fieldworks aimed to produce qualitative and quantitative data in an ‘embedded research’ approach. By embedded research, we mean scientific work produced entirely with and alongside the work of the actors, and not just at the time of the fieldwork. Lewis and Russell use the analogy of immersion for this approach, conducted with ‘reflexive collaborators’.[27] [28] This approach also implies a feedback process towards the actors, a joint work with them and their own action stakes, distinct from the scientific stakes of publication and career. For all that, the on-board research approach is not akin to a maximum involvement of research in the actors’ work, with the scientific work remaining distinct.[29]

Our work-based approach focused on the experiences and profiles of professionals whose daily work was devoted to opening up science (n=40 professionals). The fieldwork was conducted through interviews (n=41), analysis of institutional archives and web sources, and processing of content produced on social media (Twitter). The data covers a broad period of institutional intervention (from the late 1990s to late in the 2020). Table 1 summarises the main data collected and their context.

 

Occupational group	Project managers in charge of opening up to society	Open access (OA) publishing professionals. Opening up publication
Institutions and organisations surveyed	Institutes and agencies for expertise and research in France (8)	Department in charge of the coordination of the national open access strategy at the National Library of Sweden and at the libraries and chemistry departments of 5 universities in Sweden
Start date of intervention	Early 2000s	Late 1990s
Origin of data	28 interviews + participation in the work of the ‘opening charter’ (2017-2020).	13 interviews + participation in the Mötesplats Open Access conference in Stockholm (100 participants)
Organisational devices and temporality	Policies to open up to society since 2007. Occasional experiences since the end of the 1990s.	National strategy led by the National Library of Sweden since 2010. ‘Green open access’ developed since the late 1990s, ‘Gold open access’ since 2009
Methodology	Interviews, processing of web sources and archival sources	Interviews, processing of web sources, analysis of social media (Twitter).

Table 1: Data collected and their context.

Discussion

Profiles and professional trajectories of the actors of the openness

Our investigations allowed us to analyse the profiles and trajectories of some 40 people who, at the time of the survey, had been or were still in charge of opening up to society, or in charge of opening up publications. The work of the first group of people was based on three missions: organising and managing openness initiatives (public meetings, scientific communication, or initiatives); creation and management of a network of civil society organisations (non-profits, environmental and health NGOs, trade unions, etc); and mobilisation and support of the institute’s engineers (support for communication efforts, coaching interventions, etc). The second (called open access publishing professionals) also had a number of day-to-day missions at the crossroads of library science, scientometrics and, more recently, data sciences.

Those in charge of opening up to society did not share a common identity; their job titles and positions in the organisation charts were quite different from one another, being assigned either to the general secretariat of the institutions or to the scientific or communication departments. Open access publishing professionals, whose job titles differed from one another, were also attached to different organisational structures[30] and professed to being ‘librarians by profession’.[31]These characteristics tend to underline the relative invisibility of opening up work within higher education and research institutions. Other signs of this invisibility are that their activities are not part of the academic evaluation process and have little or no value in the recruitment process of academics. Some of the work carried out by committees responsible for opening up science to society is carried out by volunteers (for instance people belonging to NGOs and trade union representatives) who are not remunerated for their contribution. As the perimeters, titles, and positions in the organisational chart of professionals are adapted to each institution, opening up as a work still has little visibility in the academic sphere. The invisibility of the openness managers is, to a certain extent, at the service of their own work, and is a strong characteristic thereof.

Both groups have in common that they are composed of experienced professionals who started their careers in academia, and who are familiar with the functioning of their institutions. These previous academic experiences were combined with other experience with or for non-profits (either environmental or health-related) in the case of those in charge of opening up to society, and with or for the publishing industry in the case of open access publishing professionals. Describing the work of those responsible for opening up to society, a member of the opening up committee at several institutions summed up the variety of skills expected of them:

[Their job is] first and foremost to try to maintain the committees’ place in ongoing programs on GMOs and air quality, and to get people to participate and take a stand. It’s not easy, for example, to ask local authorities what they want in terms of air quality research. It’s a lot of work to get people to propose something. (Trade union representative, member of the opening up committee in two institutions [out of eight surveyed], July 2018)

As we can see on Table 2, ‘opening up science’ is therefore a task best carried out by academics with several years of experience, including experience outside the academic sector; in the case of opening up to society, the average professional experience at the time of our survey was 22,4 years. Based on our observations, these professionals with atypical profiles within institutions can bring to bear their experience in both sectors, and their mission involves bridging the gap between the two. They share a second characteristic of circulating extensively within national, regional, and international networks, and are generally involved in academic publication activities in English.

 

	Project managers in charge of opening up to society ‘Promote and facilitate partnerships with non-profits using different tools’ (within the framework of a policy of openness to society or not)	OA publishing professionals ‘Accompany the transformation of the scientific publishing system as it unfolds’
Missions	Facilitation and secretariat of openness devices, creation and facilitation of a network of organisations and non-profit and trade-union actors, experts and scientists on issues of institutional governance and participation	Various missions at the crossroads of the library, scientometrics and, more recently, ‘data sciences’, accompanied by training and advocacy actions
Collective identity	No common identity (various job titles, various positions in the organisation charts)	Common identity despite various job titles and positions in the organisation charts “We are librarians by profession!”
Position in the organisation chart	Communication department, general secretariat or scientific governance	Belonging to a variety of organisational structures in universities
Professional profile	Experienced profiles (recruited on average with more than 20 years of professional experience), previous experience in coordination of scientific projects, management of scientific teams, often have worked with or for non-profits	Experienced profiles, substantial experiences in developing publishing infrastructures (archives and institutional repositories, on-line journals), publishing sector veterans
Experience outside the institution	Circulate (and publish) extensively in France, Europe or within international networks	Circulate widely in Europe or within regional networks (Scandinavian countries extended to the Baltic States). Publish in English in academic journals in the field of library and information sciences or scientometrics

Table 2: Profiles and trajectories of the openness professionals.

Resources and professional competencies

The daily work of opening up science draws on a range of informal and institutionalised resources, which are described here not only as professional competencies, but also as spaces of socialisation essential to the work of both groups (see a summary/analysis in Table 3). We situate these spaces of socialisation alongside professional competencies, in that they play a key role in the reforms and transformations carried out by each institution. It is in these spaces that professional groups construct standards of openness, internalise them, and formalise a set of values linked to openness. Comparisons with other network members provide a reference point for their own institutions and organisations, since the transformation of other institutions is inseparable from that of their own.

 

	Opening up to society	Opening up publication
Spaces of socialisation	Charter of openness to society of scientific and expertise institutions (signed in 2009, 2013, 2017, 2021) Conferences and meetings between charter representatives within institutions	National level: Annual conferences Mötesplats Open Access Regional level: Nordbib Network (sharing of experiences between Scandinavian countries extended to the Baltic States) European level: OpenAPC, ESAC
Institutional competencies	Translation work of associative or union positions into scientific orientations. Extensive professional experience with circulation and knowledge of their institution’s history and governance (its internal diplomacy, as it were)	Knowing how to position themselves in the university organisation chart, getting out of the ‘library conversation’, navigating complex and unstable decision paths (in Gold OA).
Social competencies	Two main professional articulated networks : -within their institutions, with scientists and experts, -outside their institutions, with representatives of civil society	Progressive development of ‘(individualised) services to researchers’ in the context of relations with ‘clients’ / users, taking into account public protest, advocacy
Technical competencies	Few technical competencies identified. Previous experiences in the field of public understanding of science, marked interest in the processes and tools of consultation and participation.	Numerous technical competencies. Implementation and maintenance of tools and infrastructures developed in-house or commercially (databases, archives and institutional repositories; software development; statistical monitoring; establishment of lists, dashboards, visualisations, etc.), training of researchers

Table 3: Comparative table of resources and competencies to support the daily work of opening up science.

In France, those in charge of opening up to society point to their isolation within their institutions, since they are alone most of the time with a function that is still in its infancy. Among the eight French institutions we surveyed, only one employed around ten people in 2019 as project managers (the other institutions employed just one to three people in this role), whereas the number of OA professionals in Sweden is in the hundreds nationwide.

The work of opening up science then relies on important institutional competencies. The success of their mission depends in particular on the identification of decision-making processes within institutions and organisations, particularly when these are informal and therefore difficult for non-members to understand. In the case of openness of publication, participants noted that with the implementation of strategic plans and OA policies that come with mandates, it is important to move beyond the ‘library conversation’ and the (longstanding and well-structured) networks of research librarians, as one respondent at Lund University pointed out:

All the researchers are… well… they are affected by what we are doing here at [interviewee’s organisational unit], it forces us to be part of … not only the library conversation but the university. When strategic plans of the university, and mandates and policies, it is important to be part of that.[…] That’s one of our most important tasks, as I see it, to really be integrated with…, well to be visible where the decisions are being made. I don’t think we haven’t been there earlier and I think that’s one really important task, I know the university librarian is working very intensely with that work, with that task as well. (Repository administrator, October 2014)

Because they ‘open up’ the scientific work carried out by their colleagues, researchers, or experts, these professionals must be able to mobilise these colleagues or be mobilised by them. A key element of their institutional competencies is corroborated by their track record within the institutions: they have a long and distinguished career, and have generally been in the position for a long time.[32] For some, experience is an asset when it comes to mobilising their colleagues internally, as a project manager points out in this verbatim:

I can see that my knowledge of the people and the institution helps me a lot. I’m still the former member of the management committee. Even if I’m no longer a member, it’s harder to get rid of me. Likewise, when I ask them to send me their slides and I delete half of them, they don’t seem to mind too much. I don’t think it would be so easy for a youngster. (Project manager in charge of opening up to society, October 2017)

The work of those involved in opening to society also draws on an infinite range of social competencies as they function at the interface between the scientific communities that produce data, results, and work, and the communities that reuse them: non-profits, NGOs, scientific decision-makers, and other users.

A trade union representative who is a member of a number of openness bodies in France described the work carried out by a professional in an institute of expertise, underlining the professional development of this person in charge of openness to society:

[First name] was a pure scientist. They had perfectly positioned themself between management, scientific expertise and the citizen’s perspective. I don’t think many people have that ability. They weren’t a great communicator, perhaps a little rigid, but they became a communicator and a great listener. And they fight. (Trade union representative, November 2017)

In the case of open access publishing, the reuse communities are not very well defined (mainly ‘researchers’), but this is not seen as a hindrance to the work of OA professionals. On the contrary, it is a source of richness, with a pool of resources constantly renewed by training activities for ‘young researchers’ seen as the driving forces behind the transformation. For those in charge of opening up to society, the social competencies they draw on are embodied in the network of non-profits and workers’ unions they build up during the course of their mission and with each case they handle. The contact book of the professional becomes that of their institution, and professionals weave long, trusting and inter-individual relationships that lead them to have ongoing exchanges.

Opening up science is also supported by a set of technical competencies. By this we mean a set of specific competencies (in the sense of being opposed to more general competencies) that can underpin the group’s professional legitimacy. OA publishing professionals cite, among others, mastery of automatic classification tools, standards for structuring bibliographic data, protocols for exchanging metadata between institutions on the Internet (OAI-PMH), mastery of cost accounting in universities to feed data infrastructures collecting publication fees known as Article Processing Charges (APC) or ‘OA fees’, and so on. At the time of our fieldwork, we had identified only a limited number of technical competencies for those in charge of opening up to society, apart from those linked to consultation and consensus-building between the various parties. Conversely, OA publishing professionals have formalised a set of practices through long-standing operations to collect and bank publications, based on infrastructural logics that have long been part of their activities as research librarians. They carry out extensive maintenance and standardisation work, which is also visible in their social spaces. These tools, which act as boundary spanners in their work with scientists, are embodied in databases, lists, reference systems, and guidelines, as well as tutorials posted online on the university websites.

Credibility strategies developed in opening up work

As Raimbault et al[33] pointed out, ‘Steven Shapin has unlocked the study of scientific credibility and highlighted its strong similarity to the credibility sought in other professional worlds and in everyday life’. In his relational definition, Shapin distinguishes between an economy restricted to (only) scientific communities (embodied, for example, by peer reviewing of scientific articles or in science communication[34]), and a wider economy involving experts from different professions and fields, where ‘the language of quantification and of method has its consequential task in the making of credibility’.[35] Here, Shapin refers to the seminal work of Ted Porter, which fuelled the field of investigation of what has become the sociology of quantification.

In his introduction to the special issue of the Revue d’Anthropologie des Connaissances titled ‘Les jeux politiques du calcul’,[36] David Demortain shows how the intersection between the literatures of the sociology of quantification and the sociology of public action can prove fruitful. Drawing on all the contributions in the special issue, he suggests that public policy is one of the contexts in which contemporary forms of calculation, particularly algorithmic, develop and strengthen. In our case, does the logic of quantification, which translates into a ‘putting into figures’ often associated with the expansion of a market logic, extend to the two ‘coalitions of actors’[37] studied? In line with Shapin’s proposal, what credibility strategies do the two professional groups studied develop in opening up work?

While the identity of OA publishing professionals is strong (as one respondent put it, ‘We are librarians by profession!’), the relational perspective adopted in the investigation in Sweden reveals the multiple spaces in which these professionals meet with other actors: publishers, researchers, administrators or other university staff, etc (see Table 2). These meeting spaces are physical places or places without situated existence (such as the GitHub collaborative platform or the ChemRXiv disciplinary preprints repository) where ‘qualculatory’[38] devices of all kinds are deployed and shared. The following verbatim is emblematic of a situation where, if researchers appropriate the graphs for tracking OA publications (a proxy for measuring openness), it is also because they enable the departments/faculties to which they belong to position themselves in relation to each other (information that the librarian exploits in his work with them):

This graph here, it’s a way to market the open access, the idea of open access now. I think [researchers] think that’s quite interesting as well, because I know researchers, they look at their own faculty, they see the chart, it’s only 12.5, when you go to electrical engineering, it 45 on their total block, what can we do too? (Librarian, October 2014)

The prominence of quantification logics and methods is obvious when it comes to opening up publications. We will illustrate this with three examples. The first phase corresponds to the implementation in 2013 of the first OA scheme in chemistry, where lists of vouchers allocated and consumed by institutions are aggregated on a national scale by the National Library of Sweden (Figure 1). The vouchers are then redistributed by librarians to other colleagues in universities who do not have enough to enable them to open up their publications.

In the second phase (from 2018), a national strategy for collecting data sets on fees paid for OA journals (also known as Article Processing Charges) is adopted to follow the development of Gold OA (author-pays model) and the significant increase in expenditure on publication fees. Under the impetus of Germany and the UK (the countries most affected by spending inflation), the OpenAPC infrastructure was developed,[39] offering TreeMap visualisations of spending at the institutional or national level. Figure 2 shows that, in 2020, very high amounts were collected (in excess of 1 million euros for two institutions), which were then used in negotiations with publishers to set up so-called ‘transformative agreements’.

Driven by the infrastructural logic that also underpins the maintenance of existing standards, recent developments in open access publishing policies (2020-1) include the desire for ‘efficiency and standardisation’, in particular through the ESAC initiative (for ‘Efficiencies and Standards for Article Charges’) led by the Max Planck Digital Library in Germany, and in which the National Library of Sweden is a stakeholder. Based on the same principle as OpenAPC (call for voluntary participation, then extension in the form of a national strategy), ESAC analyses the evolution of ‘data’ collected on the OA market with APCs. Market Watch has thus been visually presenting median APC prices by publisher since 2015, and enriching them with ranges (1st and 3rd quartiles) (Figure 3).

These price ranges, which are made public, feed into dynamic comparisons that circulate in many institutions and countries and enable less advanced actors to make projections.

Resources mobilised by those involved in opening up to society are of a different order. These professionals do not claim to have a common identity, but they do have a common ground, which has developed and been discussed over a long period of time: the charter for the openness of institutions. Signed for the first time in 2009 by three entities, it has since been amended three times, each time resulting in an increase in the number of signatories and professional representatives involved. The charter is backed up by a signatories’ club, where we carried out participant-observation between 2017 and 2020.[40] The successive versions of the charter gave rise to numerous discussions and reformulations between the institutions (each new version requiring around a year to develop).

The signatories’ club is also an opportunity for training and direct discussions on the agendas and practices of each institution. New signatories and professionals emphasise the importance of the club in the design of their professional mission with their own employer. To those in charge of opening up to society, who often feel isolated, the charter club offers a space for meeting and defining collective issues that they cannot find anywhere else. In an interview, one manager recalled how she had taken up her new post and met other managers that had signed the charter as partners:

I met a dozen public establishments to visit them and understand their practices in terms of openness and ethics. It gave me an idea of the vocabulary behind the terms, and helped me clarify them. It saved me time, and (first name) even gave me some very practical advice on how to organise meetings… (Project manager in charge of opening up to society, October 2017)

The signing of this charter plays an important role in encouraging signatory institutions to work together. The signatories’ executive directors, as well as the institutions’ supervisory ministries, are particularly attentive to this cooperation and public communication. Paradoxically, non-profits and trade union leaders are not particularly attentive to the charter. During our survey, none of them called for a non-signatory facility to become one, or debated about the charter’s efficiency. The charter lends credibility to the work of the institutes only in the academic institutional context and not in that of civil society.

Conclusions

The exercise of comparing the work of ‘opening up’ science involved two groups of professionals of different sizes and with different professional and institutional histories. The comparison has informed us about common competencies and work characteristics (professional profiles, previous professional experience, missions, extensive socialisation spaces, etc). The comparison also highlights differences between the two groups, notably in the extensive use of quantification by open access publishing professionals. Qualculatory logics and methods are clearly vectors of credibility for the group of OA publishing professionals, but at the time of writing we do not observe the extension of qualculatory, or even commercial, logics in openness to society. Objectives, often non-quantified, in terms of openness to society are included in the contracts of objectives and performance signed between institutions and their supervisory ministries, and openness to society may also appear in public evaluation reports of higher education and research institutions commissioned by HCERES (the French evaluation agency). Strategies to boost the credibility of professionals working in the field of openness to society are limited to signing a charter. Yet those in charge of opening up to society observe one another, which enable them to stabilise professional practices and standards.

This analysis leads us to consider the contribution of the comparison between openness to society and openness in science. What common or specific arguments can be made in relation to the two case studies analysed? One group has many technical competencies specific to opening up work, the other has barely any. Examining other cases will undoubtedly enrich the analysis.

The professionals in both groups have a strong conviction that drives their professional commitment (that openness to society is a prelude to new interactions between science and society in the service of a better fight against health and environmental risks, or that OA publishing can change the ‘scholarly communication system’). As regards the latter, an examination of their practices reveals that they believe in the measurability and quantification of ‘damages’ (the Article Processing Charges) resulting from the implementation of OA policies conceived as a programmatic framework for imagining and mobilising support for change towards new practices, and not for describing and explaining existing practices.[41] Processes of professionalisation and managerialisation observed on both sites tend towards quantification practices, which risks losing sight of concerns such as research quality and ethics, even misconduct and fraud. As argued by Bowman et al in their essay,[42] open science is organised and onerous (labor has a cost) as it requires considerable work that is not recognised by institutions. In other words, if scientists and society rarely adopt open science practices (see Tenney et al[43] for an analysis of practices in organisational behaviour research), it is because the cost/benefit ratio seems low for them.

At the time of the survey, the work of opening up remained invisible in institutions – an observation shared by both professional groups. This invisibility can be analysed in two ways: it allows the professional groups to develop quietly and to benefit from a considerable autonomy of action within the institutions; invisibility could therefore be a resource for the work of opening up. Also, in the French case, invisibility weakens the sustainability of the work carried out by the ‘precursor’ professionals, thus posing a threat to the institutionalisation of the initiatives analysed.

This invisibility seems to be different from that which is classically described in the sociology of work, where it refers to the invisibility of subordinate work. While this invisibility was at the service of their profession, in the medium term it calls into question the means implemented to ensure the long-term survival of the opening. The invisibility of the role of the openness professionals weakens its system, as job changes or the training of new professionals attest. Faced with the effects of professionalisation and managerialisation (growing workforce, younger and less experienced professionnals), openness professionals also run the risk of losing the motivation and meaning of their actions, especially when it comes to the ‘sewing’ work that is essential for linking up with the communities they serve. The work of opening up lies somewhere between management, critical analysis, and (measuring) performance, whether in terms of opening up the publication or opening up to society.

Authors

Marianne Noel is a sociologist/historian trained in STS (PhD defended in 2023), with an original background (PhD) and industrial experience in chemistry. She is currently CNRS Research Engineer at Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS, UMR CNRS 9003), Université Gustave Eiffel.

Lucile Ottolini is a sociologist trained in STS (PhD defended in 2020), with an original background in psychology. In 2021 she founded the independent laboratory HC-Ecrac, and she is currently an associate member of the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS, UMR CNRS 9003), Université Gustave Eiffel.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the NECSUS editorial team and reviewers, in particular Victoria Pastor-González, for their strong support, kindness, and patience. Also, Gabrielle Bouleau and Pierre-Benoît Joly for their key input and insightful comments on earlier versions of this work.

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[1] Ottolini 2020.

[2] Noel 2023.

[3] Abbott 1988.

[4] Moedas 2015; European Commission, 2016.

[5] Joly 1999.

[6] European Commission, 2017.

[7] In France, République Française, 2016.

[8] Topçu 2013; Jarrige 2014; Debailly 2015; Ottolini 2020.

[9] Suber 2012; Guédon 2015; Chartron 2016.

[10] Li Vigni & Louvel & Raimbault 2023.

[11] Latour & Woolgar 1986.

[12] Shapin 1995.

[13] Li Vigni & Louvel & Raimbault 2023.

[14] Shapin 1995.

[15] Raimbault & Li Vigni & Louvel 2022.

[16] Demazière & Gadéa 2009.

[17] Abbott, The System of Professions.

[18] Fabiani 2003.

[19] Bergmann 1965.

[20] Delvenne 2017.

[21] However, ‘absenteeism’ measured in the entities in charge of openness to society is relative when compared with other scientific governance bodies (Scientific Council, Board of Directors) in the same institutions.

[22] Ottolini 2020.

[23] Marcus 1995.

[24] Jasanoff 2005; Hine 2007; Hine 2015.

[25] In Sweden, one of the two fields of investigation in this article, one of the interviewees concluded that without a clear definition of what open access encompasses (an infinite number of situations as discussed below), it is very difficult to measure it: ‘The same article can be made OA in several ways, and a key problem is to define what we actually mean by it. It may seem surprising that there should still be a need to discuss the definition of OA, but clearly there is, because it affects how we measure it as a phenomenon and what the result is.’ Fathli & Lundén & Sjögårde2014.

[26] Al Dahdah 2022.

[27] Sweden has a longstanding policy of transparency and open data, the availability of which proved an asset to the investigation. Secondary scientific literature in English is extensive and reflective in the field of library and information sciences (the field to which most of the interviewees referred). The interviewees’ publications (in the form of scientific articles, reports, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) were used as inputs in the fieldwork, and were then discussed and supplemented during interviews with the actors. A long-term investigation was carried out over six years, which led one of the authors of this article to follow her interviewees on Twitter and to present her results in a national meeting on open access.

[28] Lewis & Russell 2011.

[29] de Sardan 2000.

[30] The School of Education and Communication in Engineering Sciences; Department of Publishing Infrastructures; Section of Scholarly Communication; Digital Publishing Unit; Team Publishing and Bibliometry..

[31] Noel 2023.

[32] Ottolini 2020.

[33] Raimbault & Li Vigni & Louvel 2023.

[34] By science communication, we mean the work of framing a discussion between science in the making, produced by experts and researchers, and a civil or citizen action to frame a public problem. In the case of expertise institutes, there is often an ad hoc production, different from international academic output or in support of the administration, with its own formats such as discussion-debate.

[35] Shapin 1995.

[36] Demortain 2019.

[37] Ibid., p. 962.

[38] The term ‘qualcul’ coined by Franck Cochoy denotes a form of shared economic collective cognition (a collective choice entity) where actors adjust their choices to the expressions of their partners (for example, in using a supermarket cart when the family does its shopping). See Cochoy 2011.

[39] https://openapc.net/

[40] We also gained access to the club’s archives.

[41] Heimstädt & Friesike 2021; MacDonald 2022.

[42] Bowman & Spence & Hahn 2023.

[43] Tenney et al. 2021.