Parissa Mokhtabad Amrei, Science, Technology and Society

Open Science practices are shaping both science and policymaking. This thesis examines the visions of Open Science and their enactments through four empirical cases. It provides an understanding of what Open Science means in terms of infrastructures: in cases where Open Science practices exhibit infrastructuring efforts, where they reconfigure existing infrastructures, or where such infrastructuring efforts are not sustained.

In this thesis, the overarching visions of Open Science are identified as participation, public benefit, and transparency, and these visions are interpreted in relation to the erosion of public trust in science, the commercialisation of science, and the replication crisis. Alongside the emergence of these crises, new digital sharing technologies have led to the positioning of Open Science practices, such as open-source software, Citizen Science, and Open Data, as imagined and prescribed solutions to these crises.

Building on this framework, this thesis has four main objectives, each pursued through a case study with its own set of methods: first, it examines infrastructuring efforts in a cluster of published articles to investigate how transparency is prescribed as a solution to the replication crisis through a mixed-methods approach. Second, it examines the limitations of participatory knowledge-making initiatives situated outside science by comparing four citizen observatories through interviews. Third, through retrospective participant observation and document analysis, it addresses policymakers’ visions of participation in Tehran and their efforts to improve digital participatory tools. Lastly, it investigates what a public good Open Science might entail by studying the use of open-source tools in a water infrastructure through ethnographic visits and interviews.

This thesis concludes that Open Science practitioners and advocates, aim to enact reform in science and policy through the implementation of Open Science practices. However, relying on technical approaches will not address the changes they aim to achieve. Furthermore, infrastructures play a critical role in enabling or constraining Open Science visions.