"The scale and the sword: science, government and research evaluation" This article has been written in Italian because it is meant for an Italian debate: the debate on the theoretical and practical justification of the Italian research assessment system, which entrusts an élite nominated by the government with a huge, unbalanced power. According to Andrea Bonaccorsi such a system can be legitimized on the basis of his peculiar reading of R.K. Merton's normative sociology of science. Our goal, on the other hand, is showing that the resulting research assessment system would be both practically despotical and theoretically retrograde even if, at the very moment of the evaluation, the sociological description of the state of the research were perfectly true and we lived in a faultless Mertonian world. The resulting system would be despotic, because it would transform an informal ethos into a rigid set of administrative laws outside the researchers' control; and it would be retrograde because such a set would also freeze the evolution of the ways in which scientists publish, discuss and assess their works, like in kind of castle of the Sleeping beauty.
Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would be easy to add an OS mandate to the researchers' duties. But, if we conceive OS as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation rather than a management model, we have to ask: why does open science, today, need to be mandated? But, above all, can it be mandated? A Kantian thought experiment will help us to show that: (1) OS needs to be mandated because, against the spirit of the modern science revolution, it is not open any longer; (2) the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is determined by economic and political powers rather than by the will to knowledge.
Open science is not a particularly novel idea: disclosing science to expose it to a public scrutiny is among the deeds of the modern science revolution. Neither is new the unbalance between science - the living craftsmanship of a knowledge community - and its alleged embodiment in textual objects: the scope of written papers is so wide in space and time that they can be adopted as knowledge proxies. Such a question, in fact, is as ancient as Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus. Accordingly, open science can be understood in two different - and not necessarily congruent - meanings: (1) as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation among people; (2) as a management model that might also be aimed to the exploitation of open research texts and data for the sake of the market. Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would not be - administratively - difficult to add an open science mandate to the researchers' burden of duties. Philosophically, however, we have to ask not only why open science, today, needs to be mandated, but, above all, whether (open) science can be mandated. The application of a Kantian thought experiment to a vindication of the Italian State assessment of research attempted by one of its former functionaries helps us to show that: open science needs to be mandated because it is not open any longer; the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is not determined by the will to knowledge any longer, but by economic and political powers.
Open science is not a particularly novel idea: disclosing science to expose it to a public scrutiny is among the deeds of the modern science revolution. Neither is new the unbalance between science - the living craftsmanship of a knowledge community - and its alleged embodiment in textual objects: the scope of written papers is so wide in space and time that they can be adopted as knowledge proxies. Such a question, in fact, is as ancient as Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus. Accordingly, open science can be understood in two different - and not necessarily congruent - meanings: (1) as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation among people; (2) as a management model that might also be aimed to the exploitation of open research texts and data for the sake of the market. Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would not be - administratively - difficult to add an open science mandate to the researchers' burden of duties. Philosophically, however, we have to ask not only why open science, today, needs to be mandated, but, above all, whether (open) science can be mandated. The application of a Kantian thought experiment to a vindication of the Italian State assessment of research attempted by one of its former functionaries helps us to show that: 1. open science needs to be mandated because it is not open any longer; 2. the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is not determined by the will to knowledge any longer, but by economic and political powers.
Open science is not a particularly novel idea: disclosing science to expose it to a public scrutiny is among the deeds of the modern science revolution. Neither is new the unbalance between science - the living craftsmanship of a knowledge community - and its alleged embodiment in textual objects: the scope of written papers is so wide in space and time that they can be adopted as knowledge proxies. Such a question, in fact, is as ancient as Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus. Accordingly, open science can be understood in two different - and not necessarily congruent - meanings: (1) as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation among people; (2) as a management model that might also be aimed to the exploitation of open research texts and data for the sake of the market. Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would not be - administratively - difficult to add an open science mandate to the researchers' burden of duties. Philosophically, however, we have to ask not only why open science, today, needs to be mandated, but, above all, whether (open) science can be mandated. The application of a Kantian thought experiment to a vindication of the Italian State assessment of research attempted by one of its former functionaries helps us to show that: open science needs to be mandated because it is not open any longer; the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is not determined by the will to knowledge any longer, but by economic and political powers.
Open science is not a particularly novel idea: disclosing science to expose it to a public scrutiny is among the deeds of the modern science revolution. Neither is new the unbalance between science - the living craftsmanship of a knowledge community - and its alleged embodiment in textual objects: the scope of written papers is so wide in space and time that they can be adopted as knowledge proxies. Such a question, in fact, is as ancient as Plato's critique of writing in Phaedrus. Accordingly, open science can be understood in two different - and not necessarily congruent - meanings: (1) as a philosophical ideal of human emancipation through the opening of scholarly conversation among people; (2) as a management model that might also be aimed to the exploitation of open research texts and data for the sake of the market. Since the Italian research evaluation system is based on an administrative agency that is in control of all the facets of academic life, it would not be - administratively - difficult to add an open science mandate to the researchers' burden of duties. Philosophically, however, we have to ask not only why open science, today, needs to be mandated, but, above all, whether (open) science can be mandated. The application of a Kantian thought experiment to a vindication of the Italian State assessment of research attempted by one of its former functionaries helps us to show that: open science needs to be mandated because it is not open any longer; the very submission of research to blueprints dictated by an administrative authority reduces it to a bureaucratic, commodified enterprise whose horizon is not the advancement of learning - or discoveries and revolutions yet to do - but the production of information and data whose goal is not determined by the will to knowledge any longer, but by economic and political powers.
Discussione della proposta di legge (camera.395.18) sull'accesso aperto, presentata al parlamento italiano nel marzo 2018, che spiega perché sarebbe preferibile renderlo possibile con modifiche al diritto d'autore piuttosto che in seno a una disciplina per la tutela dei beni culturali. The paper deals with a bill presented to the Italian parliament by Luigi Gallo, whose goal is enhancing the current institutional Open Access mandate. However, strengthening institutional mandates without coping with copyright might just increase the bureaucratic burden on the shoulders of universities and individual researchers without managing to open a proportionate amount of scientific literature. Italy, therefore, should consider the idea of following the German, Dutch and French path: empowering authors by granting them a right to make their works available to the public for free, after a rather short period of time.
La revisione paritaria (peer review) è una parte importante della procedura che conduce alla pubblicazione di un articolo in una rivista scientifica tradizionale, costruita e pensata per la tecnologia della stampa. A due o più studiosi di campi disciplinarmente pertinenti, selezionati discrezionalmente dalla redazione della rivista e protetti dall'anonimato, viene chiesto di pronunciarsi ex ante sulla pubblicabilità di un testo. Quanto i revisori scartano non vede la luce; e, analogamente, rimangono nell'ombra i loro pareri e la loro eventuale conversazione con gli autori, che ha luogo solo per interposta persona. Questo saggio sperimenta una revisione diversa, aperta ed ex post: essendo pubblicato tramite un medium libero dai vincoli economici e tecnologici dell'età della stampa, non ha bisogno di una selezione preliminare. La revisione paritaria aperta ed ex post consentirà di rendere pubblica l'intera discussione che condurrà i lettori ad apprezzarlo, disprezzarlo, o ignorarlo, e permetterà di riconoscere il merito di chi lo migliorerà con i suoi suggerimenti. Agli studiosi partecipanti sarà richiesto soltanto di rinunciare all'anonimato, come ha fatto chi ha composto il presente testo e quello ad esso coordinato, scritto dal giurista Roberto Caso. Tratteremo la giustificazione della valutazione amministrativa della ricerca compiuta da Andrea Bonaccorsi prendendo le mosse da una concessione: faremo finta – per amor di discussione – che il sistema di valutazione da lui teorizzato sia una fotografia fedele del modo in cui la comunità scientifica valuta se stessa. Si dimostrerà che, perfino così, la sua teoria avrebbe come esito un sistema di valutazione praticamente dispotico e teoreticamente retrogrado. Il sistema è dispotico perché trasforma un ethos informale e storico in una norma di diritto amministrativo fissa, che cessa di essere oggetto di scelta da parte della comunità scientifica; ed è retrogrado perché, stabilendo questa norma, cristallizza, come nel castello incantato della Bella addormentata nel bosco, l'evoluzione in un fermo-immagine non più superabile senza ulteriori interventi amministrativi. A questo argomento principale si aggiungono alcune parti accessorie: la prima, per nulla originale, si occupa della questione, proposta da Bonaccorsi, della verificabilità empirica di alcune tesi dei suoi critici; la seconda prende in esame un campione di citazioni addotte dall'autore a sostegno di alcuni passaggi argomentativi importanti. La conclusione, infine, espone brevemente la prospettiva ideale e critica della scienza aperta che orienta questo contributo. In questo spirito, tutte le volte che ci è stato possibile, abbiamo indicato, delle fonti a pagamento di cui si vale preferibilmente Bonaccorsi, versioni e recensioni legalmente accessibili, in modo che il lettore possa controllare il nostro argomento senza dover superare ulteriori barriere economiche. ; The Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica is submitting to an open peer review a couple of articles meant for the debate on the theoretical and practical justification of the Italian research assessment system, which entrusts an academic élite nominated by the government with a huge, unbalanced power. In the opinion of Andrea Bonaccorsi, a former member of the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Institutes board of directors, the governmental evaluation of scientific research can be justified on the basis of his – peculiar – reading of R.K. Merton's normative sociology of science. The articles written, respectively, by Roberto Caso and Maria Chiara Pievatolo, scrutinize Bonaccorsi's claims both from a legal and from a philosophical point of view. Roberto Caso, in Una valutazione (della ricerca) dal volto umano: la missione impossibile di Andrea Bonaccorsi [The Human Face of Evaluation of Science: the Mission Impossible of Andrea Bonaccorsi], challenges the main argument of Bonaccorsi, according to which the governmental evaluation of scientific research is an expression of Mertonian norms of science (communism, universalism, disinterestedness, organized skepticism). Such an interpretation, in Roberto Caso's opinion, is untenable for two main reasons: it rests on a remarkable misrepresentation of Merton' s thought; it neglects the difference between fixed, formal legal rules and fluid, informal norms; hence, it underestimates the effects of a transformation from the former to the latter. Maria Chiara Pievatolo's La bilancia e la spada: scienza di stato e valutazione della ricerca [The scale and the sword: science, government and research evaluation] goal is showing that the research assessment system resulting from Bonaccorsi's misinterpretation of Merton would be both practically despotic and theoretically retrograde even if, at the very moment of the evaluation, the sociological description of the state of the research were true and we lived in a faultless Mertonian world. The resulting system would be despotic because it would transform an informal ethos into a rigid set of administrative laws outside the researchers' control; and it would be retrograde because such a set would also freeze the evolution of the ways in which scientists publish, discuss and assess their works, in a kind of enchanted Sleeping Beauty castle.
"Bollettino telematico di filosofia politica" article: why proprietary platforms like Academia.edu and Reseachgate have nothing to do with Open access.
Treading the gold road to open access without charging authors is possible, at one condition: scholars should become aware that publishing is a major scholarly concern. In an open web and in an open archives network, a plurality of small overlay journals could share the task of peer-reviewing and curating the self-archived papers ex post, as a side activity of many small groups of researchers. Beyond the legacy of the mass media age, such a new information ecosystem would be able to get over the scientific publishing oligopolies and to challenge the most witless research evaluation exercises.
Is it right to wage war to export democracy, or -- as Kant would have said -- to interfere forcibly in the constitution and in the government of another state with the goal of transforming it into a republic? The answer of Kant is contained in the fifth preliminary article of the Perpetual Peace and it leans towards non-interventionism: a bad constitution can never justify a war, because it may be the root only of a scandalum acceptum. To understand the meaning of scandalum acceptum we have to become aware that it is a term originating from moral theology, which we should translate into the language of international law. Most of Kant's contemporaries still understood the scandal as the sin of advertising a sinful behavior. A scandalum is only acceptum, however, if the act that inspired others to sin has been done without the intention to give them a bad example. A flawed constitution can only be the occasion of a scandalum acceptum because its legal power does not spread its influence beyond the border of its state. If a nation chooses to imitate the allegedly wrong constitution of another state, its choice only depends on its sovereignty, because it is a matter of internal constitutional law. On the other hand, waging war against another country because of its allegedly flawed constitution is a worse kind of scandal, the scandalum datum, because it involves an international law principle of limited sovereignty according to which every state has the right to assault another state because of its constitution.
Is it right to wage war to export democracy, or - as Kant would have said - to forcibly interfere in the constitution and in the government of another state with the goal of transforming it into a republic? The answer of Kant, contained in the fifth preliminary article of the Perpetual Peace, leans towards non-interventionism: a bad constitution can never justify a war, because it may be the root only of a scandalum acceptum. To understand the meaning of scandalum acceptum we have to become aware that it is a term originating from moral theology, which we should translate into the language of international law. The scandal, as it was still clear to Kant's contemporaries, is the sin of advertising a sinful behavior: but it is just a scandalum acceptum if the act that inspired others to sin has been done without the intention to give them a bad example. A flawed constitution can be only the occasion of a scandalum acceptum because its legal power does not spread its influence beyond the border of its state. If a nation chooses to imitate the allegedly wrong constitution of another state, its choice depends only on its sovereignty, because it is a matter of internal constitutional law. On the other hand, waging war against another country because of its allegedly flawed constitution is a worse kind of scandal, the scandalum datum, because it involves an international law principle of limited sovereignty according to which every state has the right to assault another state because of its constitution.
According to Kant, property applies only to touchable things, among which he includes the works of art. For the very principle of private property, a legitimate purchaser has the right to replicate and to share them without restrictions. Kant recognizes copyright only on written texts, by conceiving them as speeches that exclusively authorized spokespersons - the publishers - may convey to the public in the name of their authors. The rights of the authorized publishers, however, are justified only if they help the public to get the texts. In a Kantian environment, open source software would be worth of copyright protection, because it can be conceived as a speech meant to human beings. On the contrary, Kant would treat closed source programs as works of art, without according them copyright protection, because, as none is allowed to read and to understand them, they cannot be conceived as a speeches meant to the public. Closed source programs are like sealed books that no one is allowed to read: why do we keep on taking for granted that they are worth of copyright protection?
