There has been a resurgence between two closely related discussions concerning modern science funding policy. The first revolves around the coherence and usefulness of the distinction between basic and applied science and the second concerns whether science should be free to pursue research according to its own internal standards or pursue socially responsible research agendas that are held accountable to moral or political standards. In this paper, I argue that the distinction between basic and applied science, and the concomitant debate about freedom and social responsibility, require revision. I contend that the distinction can only be maintained in cases of urgent science. I go on to elucidate the notion of urgent science using a case study from research of the climate refugee crisis. 

/pdf/revisiting-the-basic-applied-science-distinction-the-1tgjwpsu.pdf

Revisiting the Basic/Applied Science Distinction: The Significance of Urgent Science for Science Funding Policy

The rise of open access (OA) publishing has been followed by the expansion of the Article Publishing Charges (APC) that moves the financial burden of scholarly journal publishing from libraries and readers to authors. We introduce the results of an international randomly selected sampled survey (N = 3,422) that explores attitudes towards this pay‐to‐publish or Gold OA model among scholars. We test the predictor role of age, professional position, discipline, and income‐level country in this regard. We found that APCs are perceived more as a global threat to Science than a deterrent to personal professional careers. Academics in low and lower‐middle income level countries hold the most unfavourable opinions about the APC system. The less experimental disciplines held more negative perceptions of APC compared to STEM and the Life Sciences. Age and access to external funding stood as negative predictors of refusal to pay to publish. Commitment to OA self‐archiving predicted the negative global perception of the APC. We conclude that access to external research funds influences the acceptance and the particular perception of the pay to publish model, remarking the economic dimension of the problem and warning about issues in the inequality between centre and periphery.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/leap.1455

Attitudes, willingness, and resources to cover article publishing charges: The influence of age, position, income level country, discipline and open access habits

Using the Strong Programme developed in Edinburgh in the 1970s clarifies how to do sociology of science freed from Enlightenment paradigms of testing for Truth. This paper uses, as an example, the case of Lewis Binford and his wife (in the 1960s) Sally Rosen, revealing Rosen’s work to make Lewis’s writing clear and persuasive. Rosen’s work was the efficient cause of Lewis Binford’s success with the New Archaeology.

/pdf/seeing-with-the-strong-programme-262vtig5.pdf

Seeing with the Strong Programme

Why do corporations and wealthy philanthropists fund the human sciences? Examining the history of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a private research institute founded in the early 1980s, this article shows that funders can find as much value in the social worlds of the sciences they sponsor as in their ideas. SFI became increasingly dependent on funding from corporations and libertarian business leaders in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, its intellectual work came to focus on the underlying principles of adaptation, innovation, and decentralized coordination supposedly at work in ‘complex systems’ from biological ecosystems to markets and firms. This research cast the ideas of the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek into a new scientific idiom. SFI also became a space where figures in business, media, academia, and politics could come to learn to see the world in a particular way—to acquire the subjectivity of what I call ‘the Santa Fe Institute libertarian’. At SFI, visitors did not simply learn the principles of neo-Hayekian complex system science. They came to see themselves as agents of social evolution, providing the spark that the free-market system needed to produce new technologies and new solutions to social problems without top-down political direction. For the Institute's corporate and libertarian financiers, SFI was not just a space where intellectuals described the world in favored ideological terms, but a space where elite actors became committed to the project of making a new political-economic order.

The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute libertarian

Welcome to the first entirely open access volume and issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation!One of the hallmarks of responsible innovation is its attempt to generally encompass multiple sit...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23299460.2021.1930885

Responsible innovation in scientific practice: prospects, tensions and the long game

Responsible innovation (RI) is one of the most recent movements to advocate that science, engineering and technology develop in ways that better reflect and respond to diverse societal values and c...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23299460.2021.1907045

Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation: by Mark Solovey, MIT Press, 2020, pp. 408, $50 USD (Paperback), ISBN 9780262539050

Zachary Pirtle

Papers

Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation: by Mark Solovey, MIT Press, 2020, pp. 408, $50 USD (Paperback), ISBN 9780262539050