University of Exeter, UK
ESOF2024 | 12–15 June 2024 | Katowice, Poland
Sabina Leonelli
Sabina Leonelli
Position and institutional affiliation
Library of Congress, USA
BIO
Sabina Leonelli is Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, the 2024 Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the USA Library of Congress, and Scientific Director of the Ethical Data Initiative (https://ethicaldatainitiative.org/). From September 2024, she will be Professor of Philosophy and History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests span critical data studies, modelling, governance and AI-powered analysis across the biological, environmental and health sciences; and open science and related transformations in the global research landscape. Leonelli has been awarded many competitive grants including two from the European Research Council, “The Philosophy of Data-Intensive Science” (2014-2019, www.datastudies.eu ) and “A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments” (2021-2026, www.opensciencestudies.eu ). She is an alumna of the Global Young Academy and regularly engages with a variety of national and international initiatives in science policy, especially concerning the governance and use of large data infrastructures. She is also Fellow of
Academia Europaea and Académie Internationale de Philosophie de la Science; President-Elect of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology; Subject Editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review; and recipient of the Lakatos Award 2018 and the Patrick Suppes Prize for the Philosophy of Science 2022 for her work on the epistemology of data and data science. Her latest book Philosophy of Open Science (2023) can be downloaded from Cambridge University Press in Open Access format.
Title of the lecture
The Multiple Lives of Excellence: Diversifying Open Science
Open Science is often presented as a solution to the multiple problems afflicting contemporary scientific practices, ranging from lack of reproducibility to dubious review procedures, inefficient communications and lack of transparency around methods and circumstances of research. Much of the debate around Open Science and how it should be implemented verges, however, on the natural sciences – and particularly physics and biomedicine – as a reference point and model for research practice. In this talk, I challenge this assumption, propose an alternative understanding of the ideas of openness and transparency, and suggest ways to value a much wider diversity of research settings and domains – including agricultural research, marine and environmental science, and the humanities, arts and social sciences - as key interlocutors and precious models for Open Science implementation.
