Suchergebnisse

The report argues that policy‐makers fail to make effective use of the high quality research of UK academics in the humanities and social sciences. Yet greater co‐operation between the government and academia could undermine the independence of the latter by increasing the role of the state in the funding and direction of university research.

Mentalities from crime -- The social meaning of witchcraft, 1560-1680 -- Witches in society and culture, 1680-1750 -- The problem of coiners and the law -- Towards a solution? Coining state and people -- Crimes of blood and their representation -- Murder: police, prosecution and proof -- A transition from belief to certainty?

Under what conditions does science influence environmental policy? International Relations (IR) scholars, such as Peter M Haas, have argued that to gain political influence, science should not connect to policy before scientific consensus has been reached. We take this suggestion as a point of departure for investigating how science is and should be connected to policy in international environmental governance. Using insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the contribution of IR is critically discussed, both to present its limitations and, primarily, to further develop the understanding of scientific consensus within IR and the need for separation and connections between science and policy. The organization and performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including the various assessments made by scholars from IR and STS, is used as an illustrative case. From the discussion of IR and STS and the role of the IPCC in climate policy, we conclude that the focus within STS on contextual and informal factors could shed light on how science and technology are understood by IR scholars, who focus more on the formal organizational design of the interplay between science and policy.

Abstract: Although we have been living through an era of the commercialization of science since the 1980s, something has dramatically changed over the last decade. Whereas commercialization used to subject research outputs to market considerations, a new development seeks to monetize nearly all aspects of the research process. This has become manifest under the rubric of "open science" as the purported solution to what is perceived to ail modern science. The commercial interests behind top journal publishers are pursuing control over "open science" by imposing the structures of "platform capitalism" upon the research process. The release of ChatGPT is best understood as the latest act in this drama, with Silicon Valley AI platforms threatening to displace the Big Five publishers as the primary protagonists of the commercialization of science.