How is the social licence for research being renegotiated under changing social, political and geopolitical conditions? Open research as an analytic lens

Openness and transparency in academic research are related in diverse ways to public trust in that research and its outputs, and to the social licence that research has to operate. This social licence grants researchers and institutions considerable ongoing autonomy, authority, resources and access to participants, data, communities, and policy influence. It is founded in the degree to which researchers and institutions are seen as trustworthy, legitimate, and acting in the public interest. The relationship is complicated between the levels and types of openness in research that society expects or is willing to tolerate, and the extent to which research and its institutions are perceived as both trustworthy and beneficial to society. Furthermore, this relationship changes over time; it is different now in the 2020s compared to the situation in the 1990s when open research first emerged as a distinct idea. While ‘open research’ is often presented as a means of generating public trust and social legitimacy, high levels of trust and social legitimacy are also the conditions that make some kinds of openness politically possible. Openness in research may depend partly on wider societal interactions that take the form of negotiations, silences, conflicts and impasse. What counts as being trustworthy and therefore warranting a social licence to operate in this context is historically and socially situated. Frameworks are emerging that may support this ongoing negotiation.