Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: New forms of radical collaboration-notably "big science," multi-authorship and academic ghostwriting-have brought renewed attention to the social nature of science.They have been thought to raise new and pressing epistemological problems, especially because they appear to have put in jeopardy the transparency, accountability and responsibility associated with traditional scientific practice.Against this worried stance, I argue that the new practices can be adequately accounted for within a standard epistemological framework.While radical collaboration may carry serious practical problems and risks, and requires critical attention to the way science is organized and communicated, it raises no fundamentally new epistemological problems.It may even serve as an example of a less restrained and more fruitful, albeit calculatedly risky, mode of conduct that could enhance scientific creativity.Science is a collaborative enterprise.It is arguably becoming ever more collaborative.A number of contemporary trends seem to support such a diagnosis.There is, first, the rise of big science, that is, of large-scale, infrastructure-dependent research, epitomized by highenergy physics or the Human Genome Project.Even in fields still dominated by smallerscale science, research has become increasingly collective.The research group has long been recognized as the fundamental unit of scientific knowledge production, 1 and global and regional research networks are gaining importance. 2 A further significant manifestation of the trend towards increased collaboration is multiauthorship.The average number of authors per paper is growing steadily, with some fields now turning out papers with several hundreds or even thousands of names on the author list.Many of the persons named may not have done any authoring in the traditional sense, but appear on the byline due to their contributions as fundraisers, managers, project partners or engineers, and some may have been granted so-called honorary or gratuitous authorship.And although bylines are getting crowded, not all authors may actually be listed as such, as academic ghostwriting is also becoming widespread.The recent trends towards free or forced collectivization of science have prompted a new wave of critical inquiry.It has been argued that radically collaborative research (henceforth RC) raises a new kind of epistemic problem, because it has put in jeopardy the transparency, accountability and responsibility associated with traditional scientific practice.When there is no centre of command, when epistemic labour is distributed widely over a seemingly uncoordinated mass of people, it not only gives rise to moral and political concerns or engineering challenges, but calls into doubt whether the activities in question can count as scientific knowledge production at all.
Author: Søren Harnow Klausen
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2611788868