Open Science: A Solution to Crisis in Science Amidst Rising Public Distrust and AI Development

Despite advancements in science-based technologies, science is facing a crisis. Sociologists note that academic success is increasingly tied to societal privilege, and public trust in academic science is waning, leading to the rise of alternative knowledge forms. The crisis is evident in the “replication crisis” and the growing distrust of research outside elite universities. The international academic community has adopted Open Science, a concept aimed at ensuring research objectivity through open access to data, methods, and publications. This approach, coupled with the rise of artificial intelligence, presents new challenges and opportunities for the field.

What is the Current State of Science and its Challenges?

The current state of science, despite the rapid development of science-based technologies, especially in the IT sphere, is described as being in a state of crisis. Sociologists have noted that in most countries, it is becoming increasingly difficult to pursue an academic career. Success in science is often dependent not so much on abilities but rather on belonging to the privileged strata of society.

Academic science no longer possesses the privileged social status it enjoyed during the 19th and 20th centuries. The general public demonstrates disappointment in academic science, leading to the formation of alternative forms of knowledge, ranging from folk science to outright pseudoscience. In the era of post-truth politics and fake news spread through social media, people no longer trust facts and experts. They do not rationally examine what is real and what is fiction but assume something is true if it suits their state of mind and ideology.

The problem, in our opinion, is not just that people do not trust facts and experts, but that it is difficult to establish the reliability of facts and the competence of experts. As Estonian scientist Jüri Eintalu argues, “Because of various reasons, it may turn out that the scientific institutions are not producing science while the non-scientists are doing real science. In the extreme case, the official science system is entirely corrupt, consisting of fraudsters.”

How is the Crisis in Science Manifesting?

The crisis in science is manifesting in various ways. For example, elite universities tend to consider any research activity carried out outside their walls as non-scientific. This leads not only to a loss of trust in scientists by the public but also to corruption within science itself. It also contributes to the growth of depression and suicide rates among graduate students and to the overproduction of professional researchers with academic degrees.

Professional science also faces crises like the “replication crisis” that took place in the 2010s when the international psychological community faced the problem of reproducing experiments. In particular, in 2015, after analyzing the data of psychological experiments published in leading journals, it was found that only 36% of such experiments could be reproduced, and with less effectiveness for the vast majority of them.

What is Open Science and How Can it Address the Crisis?

In response to the challenges of this crisis, the international academic community has adopted the concept of Open Science. Open Science appears today mostly as a way and a set of principles aimed at ensuring the objectivity of the research activity by providing open access to both data, methods, and publications. However, Open Science is not limited by open access but has other broader aims that could indeed help to overcome the social crisis and change the status of science in today’s society.

According to the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science, the concept is to address the societal challenges of our times and to establish a kind of citizen science. The same idea is also visible in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science which emphasizes that science in general is to benefit people and the planet, particularly by allowing new social actors to be engaged in scientific processes, contributing to the development of citizen and participatory science, and to the democratization of knowledge.

How Does Open Science Relate to the Human Dimension of Science?

Open Science is thus a project for the re-institutionalization of science which reflects the noted ideas of sociologists on the inadequacy of the traditional institutes to solve the current problems of science with its institutional degeneration. With the idea of citizen science in consideration, Open Science as a trend aimed at the democratization of knowledge could be argued to reveal the human dimension of science, its personalization as opposed to the institutional paradigm of managing the research activity and defining its values, goals, and methods.

What is the Connection Between Open Science and Artificial Intelligence?

This trend of the recent years coincides with another important and urgent topic of the agenda of the social discourse – the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its growing usage in many spheres, including not only industry but both scientific research and education. That raises a number of problems related not only to the field of information technologies (IT) but to humanities and philosophy as well. The development of the IT sphere is shown to be the history of its personalization, which presents the challenges for handling the present-day AI technologies so that they would augment human laborers and not replace them.