RMZ Science Works

The last twenty years of open science advocacy and the more recent proliferation of programs and funding have shown that open science has become a veritable mantra. In this communication we deliberately adopt a perspective of the sociology of work and of professions: rather than examining discourses on openness, we focus on the missions, experiences and profiles, as well as the practices, of professionals whose daily work is devoted to ‘opening up’ science. We propose to analyse the opening up of

Der Vortrag stellt erste Überlegungen zu einer Soziologie der Dummheit vor. Dummheit wird dabei als systematisch vernachlässigte, aber konstitutive Außenseite der Wissensgesellschaft interpretiert. Im Vortrag sollen daher die Akteure, Arenen, Mechanismen und Funktionen bei der sozialen Zuschreibung von Dummheit genauer beleuchtet werden.

Zu den interessantesten Entwicklungen im gegenwärtigen globalen Wissenschaftsystem gehört der rasante Aufstieg der Volksrepublik China. Als kollektiver Akteur hat es das Land innerhalb von drei Jahrzehnten geschafft, in allen gängigen wissenschaftlichen Leistungs- und Reputations-Rankings Spitzenplätze einzunehmen. Internationale Reaktionen auf diese Entwicklung sind geprägt von Faszination und - zunehmend - Sorge und Ablehnung. Nicht zuletzt fordert das autoritäre Wissenschaftsmodel der VR China

Although science has been a formidably successful force of social and technological development in the modern era, and a main reason for the wealth and well-being of current societies compared to previous times, a fundamental distrust characterizes its current status in society. According to prevalent discourse, science is insufficiently productive and in need of stricter governance and bureaucratic management, with performance evaluation by the means of quantitative metrics as a key tool to

The recent shift in evaluation systems to more diverse quality criteria has increased the visibility of lower quality research, incurring a moral panic about the effects of predatory publishing practices (PPP) on the science system. However, this concern currently lacks empirical substantiation and ignores the complex geopolitical relations, researchers’ motivations, and centre-periphery narrative inherent in the predatory publishing debate. Thus, we propose a mixed-methods approach to answering

The talk will offer a comparative review of policy-making in the area of research impact evaluation in UK (REF), Poland (EJDD) and Norway (Humeval and Sameval). Poland and Norway have used an ex-post, expert-review system modeled on the British REF. There are several analogies between the studied impact evaluation systems, including similar definitions of impact, the use of case studies as the basis for evaluation, the structuring of the impact template and English as the language of evaluation

The talk explores the epistemic dynamics catalysed by researchers advocating for the clinical relevance of environmental epigenetics in psychiatry. I do so based on an in-depth literature analysis of peer-reviewed research articles and interviews with researchers who conduct epigenetic research in psychiatry. In demonstrating how relevance builds a crucial yet ambivalent bridge between basic research and clinical application, I explore tensions arising in relation to the acceptable level of

Recent scholarship has described the “reproducibility crisis” and its associated reform movement as a social movement or a scientific-intellectual movement. This talk will argue for an alternative framing of these events which de-emphasizes high-status intellectual actors and their agendas for change, and emphasizes instead structural aspects and how they shape which reforms come to be seen as possible and desirable.Taking this alternative lens, we could see the reproducibility movement not as a