Commercially Driven Science – A Challenge for Open Research: A Commentary on “(Why) Are Open Research Practices the Future for the Study of Language Learning?”

Abstract

For many facets of research endeavors, open research is not sufficient, but it is necessary to achieve many of researchers’ aspirations and highly beneficial for other aspirations. We are optimistic that in the long-term, open research practices may washback into research to not only affect its reliability, validity, sampling, and scope, but also its very worth in society. The ideals of open research seem, at the outset, not only harmless but desirable. After all, scientific knowledge should be communal, that is, for the benefit of all people (Merton, 1974). Furthermore, for scientists to avoid biases, fraud, questionable methods, and faulty designs and analyses, criticism should be encouraged and allowed in all stages of research. Opening the research process (design, data collection and interpretation, analysis and presentation of results, etc.) appears as a promising strategy to accomplish this. In sum, according to this ideal, science should be transparent, collaborative, public, and democratic, and scientists should be accountable for the knowledge that they produce. While agreeing with the ideal, we also consider it important to examine how scientists and policymakers have actually implemented open research. In particular, we note how open research initiatives and policies have been encouraged mainly for publicly funded research, even though privately funded research is not only prevalent nowadays but also has been linked to most of the problems and questionable research practices that the open research movement has denounced. To the greatest extent and with the fewest constraints possible publicly funded scientific research data should be open, while at the same time respecting concerns in relation to privacy, safety, security and commercial interests, while acknowledging the legitimate concerns of private partners. (Willetts et al., 2013, p. iii) This asymmetry would not be a problem if it were not for the fact that most scientific research today is privately funded and conducted for commercial interests (Eurostat, 2022; National Science Board, 2022). Consequently, open research practices and policies, as they have been implemented, target only a small part of what the scientific community currently produces. Meanwhile, private companies can decide whether or not to share the results, data, and instruments of their research, depending on their financial interests (Fernández Pinto, 2020). If open research policies target solely public science, then most problems related to lack of transparency, closedness, and replication in scientific research, all of which open research practices are supposed to amend, would be left untouched. Commercial interests are not foreign to language learning. As Marsden and Morgan-Short have pointed out, replication in language studies is difficult to implement given the secrecy and closedness of proficiency measures that have property rights due to their commercial value. Without data and instruments, scientists have to replicate studies with instruments created from examples and superficial descriptions in initial studies to the detriment of their quality and usefulness. As Marsden et al. (2018) stated, “poor availability of materials reduces the replicability of studies and also weakens claims that can be made by replications (because the extent of parity with initial studies is difficult to ascertain)” (p. 353). If open research policies and incentives are mainly for public research, then the lack of transparency of language studies and the difficulties for replication would remain unaddressed, just to mention one example. Though the authors acknowledge that this situation is undesirable, it should not be underestimated, for commercial interests permeate scientific research today. Some have even argued that open research is reengineering science to a new form of platform capitalism, transferring research problems to the cybersphere (Mirowski, 2018). If researchers wish open research practices to be the future, addressing how to open commercially driven research should be at the center of the debate. Otherwise, open research policies might end up just incentivizing the privatization of publicly funded science, thus escalating the issue. Additionally, understanding and addressing the commercial dimensions of open research today might also be important for counteracting issues of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). If one considers that most scientific research done in low and middle income countries is still publicly funded, open research policies might end up encouraging the privatization of research contributions from the world's most marginalized scientific communities and thus contribute to injustice in the global knowledge economy.