The Open Inquiry Integrity Protocol (OIIP): A General Framework for Scientific Criticism, Theory Appraisal, and Research Conduct

Scientific disagreement is indispensable to the growth of knowledge, yet disagreement becomes methodologically unreliable when criticism is premature, asymmetric, personally motivated, insulated from countercriticism, or applied through standards that the framework under examination explicitly disputes. This paper proposes the Open Inquiry Integrity Protocol (OIIP), a general framework for evaluating scientific theories and scientific criticism while keeping epistemic appraisal distinct from interpersonal conduct. OIIP rests on four commitments: respect for persons, freedom of criticism, evidential symmetry, and correctability. It requires that a framework first be understood and examined for internal coherence before being judged externally; that criticism be classified according to whether it is developmental, foundational, or hybrid; that paradigm-changing proposals receive neither exemption from evidence nor automatic rejection by inherited criteria; and that criticisms themselves remain subject to the same standards of evidence, disclosure, and revision imposed on the theories they evaluate. The protocol incorporates explanatory economy, including a restrained form of Ockham’s razor, but rejects the simplistic equation of simplicity with truth. It also introduces safeguards against premature judgment, conflicts of interest, group protection, selective disclosure, defensive counterattack, and the concealment of weaknesses. Historical cases are proposed as retrospective stress tests rather than as foundations from which the protocol is reverse-engineered. OIIP does not attempt to define a single universal scientific method. Its purpose is narrower and practical: to provide a transparent sequence through which claims, theories, criticisms, and scientific conduct can be evaluated without granting epistemic immunity to authors, critics, prevailing frameworks, alternative frameworks, or the communities surrounding them. The protocol is extended by Appendix A for comparisons between paradigmatic frameworks whose methodology, ontology, or epistemology differ enough to make direct conceptual translation incomplete.