It has been over a year since we (Julieta and Esther) started as regional coordinators for Latin America and Europe. At the start of the year, we already noticed a gap between the worlds of ‘Open Science’ in academia and the members of the Open Knowledge Network. Why is it that these two worlds have similar values but barely seem to connect? While both aim to promote free access to information, they seem to do so by different types of peoples associated with the separate movements.
This becomes particularly apparent when you check out the events that are organised, for example, LoveData week has an Open Science focus and is organised in the week of the 14th of February, two weeks before the Open Data Day event is organised by the Open Knowledge movement. The Open Education week even overlaps with the Open Data Day event. Why do we not join forces and organise these efforts together?
Openness in Science
Open Science is the movement towards opening up the scientific process, being both more inclusive of who gets to participate and benefit from science, as well as more transparent in the way that it is conducted (UNESCO 2023). The Open Science movement arose because of the issues in the academic system: with a focus on the quantity of publications in specific outlets that are closed off behind paywalls, scientific integrity became less important. Under the “publish or perish” model, researchers need to bend their results and obscure their methods to fit a narrative that will get their work into a renowned journal. The direct outcome of this is the current replicability crisis, where a lack of transparency makes it impossible to reproduce results of scientific experiments, potentially compromising the credibility of science as a whole. Open Science as a movement aims to bring back integrity to the forefront, opening up the scientific process for inspection which would lead to higher quality research. It would also democratise the research process and, by focusing on contextualizing openness, make the research process more equitable. Yet while Open Science aims to open up the scientific process also to the public, it is still often confined to academic circles and specific disciplines.
One of the biggest problems that the Open Science community faces is that there is little incentive for researchers to openly publish their work. This not only means publishing a paper in an open access journal, but includes all sorts of publications like blog posts, sharing data and code in public repositories, giving talks outside the academic community, and developing educational resources. Many funding agencies don’t have requirements regarding open results on their grants (for example, CONICET in Argentina requires a Data Management Plan for some grants, but not all of them), or don’t give significant weight to these atypical research outcomes during their selection processes.
Open Knowledge
Open Knowledge is a broader definition and aims to provide free access to any form of information – not just scientific. It emphasizes the importance of using, modifying and sharing data and content, regardless of the domain, to ensure a more equitable distribution of knowledge. Even though Open Science is part of the Open Knowledge concept, the focus here seems to lie more on civic tech and democratisation of data processes, rather than just opening up the results of academic outputs.
The Open Knowledge movement is incredibly diverse and it includes topics like Data Journalism, Open Government, Open Source, Open Hardware, Open Infrastructure, and many others. These initiatives tend to be driven by informal or independent communities, allowing for quicker changes compared to the more centralized academic environment. On the other hand, this decentralized structure makes the communication between open knowledge communities more difficult, isolating them and obstructing standardization.
Common Ground in the Open Knowledge Foundation
The most prominent example of the Open Knowledge Foundation opening up space to connect with open scientists is the Frictionless Data for Reproducible Research project (supported by Sloan). As part of the project, three cohorts of Frictionless Research Fellowships were run (learn more about the fellows on the Frictionless Data Website). Within the framework of this project, a tool fund was set up, for which several projects were selected. Frictionless Data also worked with data repositories, like BCO-DMO and Dryad, to integrate the Frictionless Standard and/or validation. Frictionless Data organised a workshop on FAIR and Frictionless Workflows for Tabular Data with TU Delft. You can learn more about the Frictionless Data project from a presentation by Lilly Winfree at FOSDEM in 2020.
Further in the past, the Open Knowledge Foundation also organised the Panton Fellowships, to support scientists who promote open access to data, as a follow up of the Panton Principles. Learn more about this via the blogpost about the launch of the Panton Fellowships. Furthermore, there used to be an Open Science Working Group as part of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Individual network members are also involved in the Open Science movement, or connected to Open Science focused communities. Examples are the connections with The Turing Way, of which several Open Knowledge Network members are a contributor or have been engaging with (such as Oleg Lavrovsky from the Swiss chapter trying to bridge the Frictionless and Turing Way communities, or Esther Plomp who is a project member of The Turing Way who organised an Open Data Day event with the Turing Way on Nurturing Open Science in Challenging Economic and Political times). The founder of Gigascience (an open access, open data, open peer-review journal focusing on ‘big data’ research from the life and biomedical sciences), Scott Edmunds, is also a part of the Open Knowledge Network. Jiri Marek from the Czech Republic is another member that focuses on Open Science.
Barriers Around Open Science
Open Science practices are difficult to follow for everyone and, since scientific career evaluation is still pretty much bound to high-impact venues, the path to implementing open practices is complicated. Let’s explore some of the limitations.
First of all, there is the language. Most academic research nowadays is very niche, so finding a way to make it engaging to the non-academic public requires both the will and the ability to present complex and nuanced topics as clear concepts and, unfortunately, scientists have little training in this. Yet, if we do not communicate research in better ways, the public may lose trust in this type of work, leading to deprioritisation of research and downplaying the importance of evidence based policy making, or other attacks on knowledge. The opening and improvement of scientific processes would benefit researchers, as well as all of us and, therefore, the entire open knowledge community should be more involved.
Another issue is the general lack of understanding about what Open Science is, why it’s beneficial to everyone and how it can be implemented. And this is probably where we, as a network, can have the bigger impact. First of all, we can raise awareness about how all kinds of research outcomes are valuable ways of sharing knowledge with the communities directly impacted by it. We can also share tools, code and infrastructure in a way that’s agnostic to the purpose, since many of those are not targeted to a specific use case. We can actively host inclusive environments where the Open Knowledge and Open Science communities can contribute and benefit from.
When Open Science is limited to Open Access in expensive journals that are considered to be more prestigious, another limitation is the sustainability and equitability of the movement.
The fees to publish an open access article in hybrid journals are reaching unsustainable amounts, like the 12,690 USD fee for publishing in Nature. This much money could support an entire research team in Latin America for years so, of course, “budgeting” to publish open access in these expensive venues is hardly an option. According to Nature itself, the benefits of publishing open access are that those publications are “seen by more people. Open Access articles are viewed and cited more often than articles behind a paywall”. Which means that wealthy research groups get to publish open access in prestigious venues, so they get cited more, get even more funding, and so on. Completely against the purpose of open access and Open Science, this would lead to a widening gap between Global North and Global South scientific development. This would not have to be this way if researchers and funders stopped caring about these types of prestigious outlets, which are comparable to more expensive fashion brands – it may look a certain way but in the end, pants are pants. There are plenty of Open Access options available that are free for both researchers and readers (Diamond Open Access) and which achieve the same amount of quality, but as long as the publishing game is a pay to win game, the Global North is more likely to win.
Barriers Around Open Knowledge
Access to knowledge has increased dramatically within the past few decades. Just looking at software development, platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow provide a tremendous breadth and depth of technical information. Similarly, Wikipedia has become a cornerstone of accessible general knowledge. While these sites are widely known and used, they represent only a fraction of what the open knowledge movement aspires to be. It is in the emerging, decentralised, and often community-driven spaces of open knowledge that the most interesting developments, and the most persistent barriers as well unfortunately, are found.
Despite shared values with Open Science, the open knowledge movement remains highly fragmented. This is due in part to the broad and loosely defined nature of the concept, but also to a structural reality in which many initiatives, ranging from open data to civic tech to open infrastructure, compete for limited funding, visibility, and influence. The sector is chronically under-resourced (and even more so since January 2025), and collaboration is often hindered by organisational silos and duplication of efforts. Unlike in academia, where metrics such as publications and citations offer some recognition, there are few formal incentives for contributing to open knowledge projects. As a result, engagement often relies on unpaid, volunteer labor that is difficult to sustain long-term.
The spirit of free sharing that characterised the early Internet and underpinned much of the Open Knowledge Movement is increasingly being challenged by commodity-driven control structures. Data, once shared as a public good, is now more frequently seen as a monetizable asset, often locked behind paywalls or proprietary platforms. This shift has real consequences: it restricts equitable access to information and stifles innovation that could otherwise emerge from openly available knowledge.
On top of this, the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) presents new and growing challenges. Many AI systems operate in black-box environments that do not disclose how information is processed or generated, and the outputs they produce are not necessarily reusable or openly shared. While individuals benefit from powerful tools, the collective knowledge generated often remains inaccessible. The result is a growing disconnect between individual empowerment through tools and collective advancement through shared knowledge, a gap that threatens the foundational ideals of both open science and open knowledge.
Last but not least, there is limited awareness among scientists about Open Knowledge initiatives that exist outside academic institutions. This lack of mutual visibility is one of the reasons why the Open Science and Open Knowledge communities, despite the fact they share goals, often remain disconnected in practice. While citizen science initiatives have helped bridge some of this gap by involving the public directly in the research process, academia as a whole continues to operate in relatively isolated systems that rarely engage with broader open movements. For researchers steeped in traditional academic structures, it can be difficult to understand what concrete benefits engagement with Open Knowledge networks and communities might offer. Without clearer pathways for mutual collaboration, many scientists see these networks as peripheral or unrelated to their core work.
Conclusion/Call to Action
While there are some initiatives and people with overlapping interests between the Open Science and Open Knowledge movement, it seems that there could be a deeper integration between the two. So, why does this rift exist and how could we stimulate these common interests and benefit from both movements aligning?
As both the Open Science and Open Knowledge movements have similar values, we should align and work together instead of acting as separate movements. Open Science and Open Knowledge both strive for the same goal — a world where information is free and accessible to all. By finding common ground, these two movements together can shape a more open and collaborative future.
We encourage scientists to learn about Open Science principles and practices and try to use them in their daily work, to engage more actively in the Open Knowledge movement by becoming members of communities like the Open Knowledge Network, and to advocate for more transparent ways of doing science. In turn, the Open Knowledge Network could cooperate more with Open Science networks such as the Open Science Communities, Open Life Science, MetaDocencia, FORRT, or many others. We hope that with the increased engagement between the movements, space will open up for future joint action which will positively impact the openness and transparency of knowledge.
