I was just reading the French Second National Plan for Open Science. Its introduction made me think.

“Open science refers to the unhindered dissemination of results, methods and products from scientific research. It draws on the opportunity provided by recent digital progress to develop open access to publications and - as much as possible - data, source code and research methods.” https://www.ouvrirlascience.fr/second-national-plan-for-open-science/

Might digitization of science be a better term for what we do? Even more so now that FAIR principles seem to have become part of the movement, while these principles also apply to closed data? Often openness is not enough, for example, to make it easy to redo studies and build on them or when it comes to interoperability and standards.

One reason to opt for the term “Open Science” is probably that open sounds good. But a more neutral term like “digitization” may alert us to situation where more openness is not good. When a professor or boss harasses people it is good to have private communication and warn people about this. It is easier to to get honest negative feedback if one is anonymous. The best funded part of “open science” seems to be the increasingly pervasive surveillance of science for the publish of perish micro-management system by bureaucrats who are not in a position to judge what good science is.

My rule of the thumb would be open/transparency is good to check on power. Privacy is good for normal folks to be able to organize against abuses of power.

A disadvantage would be that the term “digitization” de-emphasizes increasing communication between science and the outside world and the importance of diversity. Those parts of open science are also important for science, at least as long as insecure people down vote posts on diversity on this feed.

The term “digitization” clearly signals it is the future, but it is also something that obviously can have bad and good outcomes, something we should actively design and participate in to arrive at a better future for science. It would be somewhat going back to the roots, open access used to be called online scholarship.