Open Science: a Critique of a New UNESCO Project

The subject of the authors’ research is a preliminary draft of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Recommendation on Open Science, which was presented to the world community at the end of September 2020. According to the draft Recommendation, “open science” is understood as a framework concept of various institutions and forms of activity aimed at “making scientific knowledge, methods, data and facts open and accessible to all”. According to the authors, making the fruits of science available to all mankind and making them the property of all mankind is not the same thing.

The declaration of free access to “scientific raw materials” does not mean that all countries receive equal opportunities for its “extraction”, processing, creation of new goods on its basis and receiving income from their sale. These opportunities today are focused on the “global North”, or rather in that part of it, which essentially monopolized the world markets for collecting, storing, processing, examining and publishing the primary results of scientific research.

According to the authors, the concept of “Open Science” proposed to the world community in relation to modern economic and legal realities is the concept of devaluation of “scientific raw materials” in order to obtain the maximum profit from the turnover of goods created with its use by a narrow circle of beneficiaries.

The interests of Russia, most of the world’s states and scientists are not to consist in supplying the collective world dominant with “scientific raw materials” at a negative cost, i.e. paying extra for it, and then buying everything new, science-intensive and useful from it.

An alternative to the instrument of “soft” dictate against national governments and the majority of scientists, proposed on behalf of UNESCO, could be the initiation of a general Convention on Science, which would solve real economic and legal problems of the circulation of scientific results, including issues of their receipt, global monitoring, storage, processing, expertise, assessment, remuneration of scientists’ labor.

The article’s authors propose at the political level to openly abandon the previously chosen model of organization and legal regulation of Russian science, focused on the interests of the global North.

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