Open science works best when researchers help write the rules
For two decades, “open science” has been one of the most agreed-upon ideas in research: share your data, publish where anyone can read it, show your methods so others can check and build on them. Governments and funders across Europe have turned that ideal into policy. The promise is enormous—faster discovery, less duplicated effort, and knowledge that reaches the public who paid for it.
But a quieter question has lingered behind the mandates: what happens when the rules meet the messy reality of an actual lab? A 2025 study in Science and Public Policy by Erika Lilja, a researcher at Tampere University and the Finnish Environment Institute, offers a careful answer. Openness, she finds, is not a switch you flip from above. It is a continuous series of ethical judgments that researchers make themselves—and policy works only when it respects that.
What the study looked at
Lilja’s paper, “Responsibility dynamics in open science,” examines how working researchers actually frame their obligations when asked to open up their work. Rather than measuring compliance, it asks a more human question: when a scientist decides what to share, when, and with whom, what sense of responsibility are they drawing on?
From researchers’ own accounts, she identifies three distinct orientations:
- Inward, toward the craft. A duty to the integrity and standards of one’s own field—sharing in ways that preserve rigor and don’t distort the work.
- Outward, toward society. A duty to the public and to the taxpayers who fund research—making knowledge accessible and useful beyond the academy.
- Shared, toward the community. A collective responsibility for what “openness” should even mean, negotiated across disciplines rather than handed down as a single template.
The point is not that one orientation is correct. It is that researchers hold all three at once, and that a good open-science policy has to leave room for them to be balanced case by case.
Why “as open as possible” isn’t automatic
The field’s guiding slogan is “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.” That second clause does a lot of quiet work. A genomics dataset, a map of an endangered species’ nesting sites, an unpatented engineering advance, or human-subjects data each carry different stakes. Opening them is not a clerical step; it is a decision with ethical weight.
Lilja’s earlier work in the same journal gave this tension a name: policy alienation. When openness mandates arrive as uniform, one-size-fits-all rules—often justified in the abstract language of economic growth—researchers can feel both powerless over decisions that affect their work and disconnected from the purpose behind them. The result is the opposite of what reformers want: not enthusiastic openness, but reluctant box-ticking.
Her newer paper reframes the fix. If responsibility is something researchers actively exercise, then they should be genuine participants in defining responsible openness—not just its end-users. “Openness is continuous negotiation,” as she put it around the defence of her doctoral thesis, Beyond Compliance. Researchers, she argues, should be brought in to experiment with and shape what the principle means in practice.
The timely twist: security and AI
This matters more now than it did when open-science policies were first drafted. Two pressures have grown up around openness. Research security raises hard questions about whether some geospatial data or sensitive new technologies should be fully public. And artificial intelligence introduces fresh dilemmas about how shared data and methods are reused.
Lilja’s encouraging claim is that these are not arguments against openness. Done thoughtfully, responsible openness—clear documentation, transparent process, deliberate choices about what to share—can actually strengthen both research security and the responsible use of AI, rather than fighting them.
What this does not settle
This is a thoughtful piece of social science, not a laboratory result, and its limits are worth stating plainly.
- It maps attitudes, not outcomes. The study illuminates how researchers frame responsibility. It does not, by itself, measure which policies produce the most or best open research.
- It is qualitative and situated. The findings draw on researchers’ accounts in a largely European, Finnish-influenced policy context. How well the three orientations travel to other systems is an open question.
- It leaves real gaps. By Lilja’s own framing, the analysis stops short of career security and precarity—how openness interacts with the brutal incentives of hiring, tenure, and credit. That is arguably where reform is hardest.
- The original is paywalled. This summary leans on the published record, the author’s own statements, and an independent literature review; readers who can reach the full text should treat it as the authority.
Why it counts as human progress
Open science is one of the genuine accelerants of the modern world. Shared data and methods let discoveries compound instead of being rediscovered; open access lets a clinician in one country use a finding from another. Getting it right is not a bureaucratic footnote—it is part of how the whole machine of progress speeds up.
Lilja’s contribution is a reminder that the way we pursue a good thing matters as much as the goal. Openness imposed as a mandate can curdle into resentment and quiet non-compliance. Openness built with the people who do the work—respecting their judgment about what to share, when, and with whom—is more likely to stick, and more likely to be genuinely responsible.
It is a small, humane correction to a big idea: if we want a more open science, the researchers carrying it out should help write the rules they live by.
Primary sources
- Paper: Lilja, E. (2025). Science and Public Policy 52(6): 852–864
- Author record: Tampere University Research Portal
- Background: LSE Impact Blog — “Universal Open Science policies risk alienating researchers”
Drafts may be assisted by AI. Every published article is reviewed and edited by a named member of our staff before publication.
