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The science is amazing. It is dynamic, transformative, and powerful. It’s also a valuable and fragile item, so there’s a chance you might lose it. It is both inclusive and exclusive, extending to every corner of the globe, yet evading much of the knowledge that is actually used. It is shared, useful, and universal, and at the same time freely manipulated as an instrument of commercial competition and a weapon of war. Science can be good, bad, and ugly. We need to emphasize the positive aspects.
Today’s internationally networked scientific system, characterized by global journals, cross-border messaging and projects, is the result of the advent of the World Wide Web in 1990. Then his two bibliometric systems, Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus, set the boundaries. valid and legal.
In 1970, only 2 percent of scientific papers were co-authored internationally, but in 2020 shared papers reached 23 percent of the output of the Scopus index, averaging 5.4 percent per year from 2003 to 2022. Increased. , the amount doubles approximately every 13 years.
Production capacity extends beyond developed countries. China is currently the largest science producer, with just under 900,000 Scopus papers in 2022, compared to just over 450,000 in the United States. With a population of over 200,000 people, India has become the third largest producer, ahead of Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan. South Korea, Brazil, Iran, and Indonesia also have large fast-growing systems. The network is open. Beginners have access to vast resources and the freedom to collaborate with anyone. The fastest growing connections are between researchers in emerging scientific countries.
Scientific knowledge is collective, collaborative, cumulative, and at best is a common good that transcends the private interests of individuals, organizations, companies, and nations and is considered at the level of the world as a whole. In fields such as climate science, artificial intelligence, and coronavirus, global systems are integrating all scientists. Everyone notices new discoveries quickly.
Science speaks truth to power and can cut through all the fake news and manipulative populism. The reflexivity of science, the way it judges itself, tests truth. All of this is extremely valuable.
But there’s also a downside. Global science is postcolonial in capacity, but neocolonial in form. Although truth is not a Western monopoly, the design and implementation of science is almost exclusively Western. The journal’s editor is biased toward the top universities in the English-speaking world, with Western Europe in his second place and the rest close behind. Scientific norms and protocols are as Western-driven as they were before scientific capacity was pluralized by the web.
English, the mother tongue of only 7 percent of the world’s population, is the only lingua franca of science, yet little effort is made to translate research conducted in other languages into English. Exclusion from the global system renders vast and diverse literature ‘unscientific’ and has only local meaning, just as happened to the knowledge of colonized peoples. Masu. Excluded knowledge includes indigenous knowledges with understandings of land, nature, and ecosystems that are often more constructive than the relationships with nature promoted by accumulated capitalism. is. By blocking this diversity from view, we lose a lot.
Unfortunately, this block is not the work of commercial exploiters. Nor can we blame oppressive governments. It was designed by autonomous scientists themselves working in university networks at major universities, with support and assistance from publishing companies and bibliographic research companies.
Then there’s the ugly side of science. Fossil fuel companies fund attacks on climate research, populist politicians attack science and universities, and geopolitics undermines cross-border cooperation.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 not only destroyed some of Ukraine’s scientific capabilities, but also expelled many Russian scientists from Russia and isolated those who remained. Meanwhile, the United States is separating itself from China in science and technology in order to slow China’s rise. These include fewer co-authored papers, persecution of some scientists with ties to both countries, and fewer U.S. visas for Chinese doctoral students. The United States is pressuring other Western countries to follow suit. Cooperation with China is currently subject to unprecedented securitization, inhibiting the two-way flow of ideas.
So where do we go from here? We promote further opening up of science, not closure. We keep all cooperation as open as possible. There is no Cold War in science! We will protect the autonomy of world science from techno-nationalism.
We also need to do what we can to break science out of its neocolonial shell and establish a fully global system. The way to achieve more democratic power relations in science is, first, true open access publishing, rather than the fake “gold open access” where authors pay publishers, and second, plural A global scientific dialogue in the languages of the world. Publishers now have software to translate knowledge into and from English. There is no reason not to publish all major journals and books, regardless of publisher, in multiple languages.
In the face of global problems, all we have is knowledge and cooperation. That’s why it’s important to bring all voices, different perspectives, and all insights and ideas into the common conversation.
Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford and Director of the ESRC Global Higher Education Center.This article is based on his opinion CGHE Working Paper 109“A bird’s eye view of university science around the world.”
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