Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science

The current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs. There is an assumption that once these new tools are in place, researchers—and at times, members of the general public—will be able to participate in the creation of scientific knowledge in more accessible and efficient ways. While many of these new tools have indeed assisted in the ease of collaboration through online spaces and mechanisms, the narrowness of how infrastructure is imagined by open science practitioners tends to put the use of technology ahead of the issues that people are actually trying to solve, while failing to acknowledge the systemic constraints that exist within and between some communities. Drawing on an analytical framework grounded in Black feminist intersectionality (Noble, “A Future”), this paper highlights the need for more inclusive knowledge infrastructures, particularly in the context of fair and sustainable development. Three case studies from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet), are outlined in order to illustrate the importance of moving beyond a definition of infrastructure as merely a technical or physical entity. These cases, arising from research conducted in South Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean, demonstrate how more sustainable and nuanced forms of collaboration and participation may be enabled through broader understandings of knowledge infrastructures. This paper further argues that leveraging the feminist concept of intersectionality when conceptualizing the development of knowledge infrastructures could be one way to move from narrow assumptions about standardized knowledge “users” towards more inclusive reimaginings of how a plurality of knowledge can be produced and shared via networked technologies.Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada, Leslie Chan. Whose Infrastructure? Towards Inclusive and Collaborative Knowledge Infrastructures in Open Science. ELPUB 2018, Jun 2018, Toronto, Canada