The Corruption of Openness?

Within a decade, Open Science (OS) reforms have moved from the fringes of scientific discourse to the forefront of scientific practice and public policy. Scientists, universities, publishers, and funders have rapidly adopted the idea(l)s of open science: data sharing, open access, preregistration, registered reports, and replication have become rewarded or even mandatory in many fields. This rapid and ongoing reform is often portrayed as the success of an earnest scientific grass-roots effort towards a better, more democratic, and inclusive ‘Scientific Utopia’ (Crespo López et al., 2025; Nosek Nosek et al., 2012; Uhlmann et al., 2019). However, more recent observations suggest that this narrative might need some critical re-evaluation, since the movement might have never been exclusively grass-roots driven, but rather astroturfed to a certain degree. Primarily, through the direct involvement of extremely powerful non-academic actors in the form of venture capitalists and political institutions, which provided seed funding to integral OS organisations and infrastructure, thus potentially exerting direct influence on them and their agenda-setting (Bartscherer Mirowski, 2018, 2023; Uygun Tunç et al., 2023) as well as, more generally speaking, the role of OS as a catalyst for the commercialisation of science (Fernández Pinto, 2020), the high profits large commercial publishers make with Open Access formats (see e.g. Butler et al., 2023) or the financial mechanisms of exclusion and inequality linked to OS (see e.g., Nkoudou 2020; Ràfols, 2025; Ulpts et al., 2025). Each of these factors raise questions about whether Open Science is improving science or simply adding a new coat of transparency-tinted paint. Answering this question requires reconciling these diffuse observations to clarify the political and financial backdrop of (Open) science reform. What are the agenda-setting goals of private investors and political actors? How have these come to influence and shape OS and science more broadly? We take this as an opportunity to collectively explore these matters and brainstorm about how to investigate and address these issues surrounding science reform. In the planned workshop we would therefore like to ask: Who funds OS? Who benefits from OS financially? How do private and political interests work against the proclaimed idea(l)s of OS? What examples of ‘OS backsliding’ can we identify already? What is the interaction between OS implementations in research policy — for instance in the form of Open Innovation agendas (Heimstädt Lund, 2025) — and the financial realities of OS? -- This presentation was given as part of the workshop "The Finances & Politics of (Open) Science Reform" on 19th May, 2026.