About the Philosophy of Open Science

In this article, Sabina Leonelli questions the idea that science consists in the accumulation of facts, methods and insights, whose free circulation, scaffolded by technologically sophisticated infrastructures, suffices to guarantee research progress. She contends that this view of research is misleading and unrealistic, and that related understandings of openness are unlikely to deliver the epistemic benefits associated to the OS movement in the long term. This is not because the technologically mediated sharing of resources is not relevant to scientific development, but rather because sharing does not constitute a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition for conducting reliable and responsible open science.