The war on (open) science

The war on Science

The war on science has been raging for more than 50 years, even within democratic societies. Conservative think-tanks have been trying to discredit science and scientists ever since the scientific evidence started revealing some highly inconvenient truths, like that tobacco causes lung cancer, that DDT has long-lasting detrimental health effects, that many widely-used chemical compounds lead to ozone depletion in the atmosphere, that nuclear bombs can annihilate humanity, and, of course, that burning fossil fuels causes air and water pollution, acid rain, and global warming (Oreskes & Conway, 2011).

In this context, the private interests that are negatively affected by scientific evidence, have used traits of academic research as weapons against its legitimacy. Honest expressions of scientific uncertainty (e.g. we can never be 100% certain about any scientific theory, we just accumulate evidence in favor or against it) have been framed as indicative of lack of consensus among experts, implying that no steps should be taken based on the science until it unequivocally comes to a single conclusion (a logical tactic termed “impossible expectations”; Lewandowsky et al., 2022). Unfortunately, the anti-science conspiracists seem to have recently added a new weapon in their arsenal, namely Open Science.

Replicability crisis and the Open Science movement

In the past 20 years, mounting evidence has shown that significant proportions of academic research is not replicable in social science and humanities, as well as in medicine (Ioannidis, 2005; Open Science Collaboration, 2015). These findings highlighted multiple problematic phenomena like the publish-or-perish norm in academic publishing, the positive publication bias, the free labor - reviewer exploitation by publishing houses, conflicts of interests, and the intense competition for professor positions. These phenomena have led to increased cases of research misconduct (p-hacking, data fabrication and falsification, ghost authorship, paper mills; Head et al., 2015; Candal-Pedreira et al., 2022) as well as a dominance of low-level studies (insufficient samples – low power, incorrect statistical methods, improper – endogenous experimental methods, etc.).

The scientific community was shaken to its core by these findings and soon started exploring ways to deal with this severe issue in what is now known as the Open Science revolution / movement (Munafò et al., 2017). Preregistrations were introduced as a means to reduce p-hacking, researchers were required to declare any conflicts of interests in their publications, journals were pressured to also publish papers with null results in order to reduce the positive publication bias, journals started requiring that researchers upload their data and statistical analysis code to mitigate academic fraud and to facilitate replication studies, platforms like the Open Science Framework (OSF; Foster and Deardorff, 2017) and AsPredicted were created to facilitate preregistrations and sharing data, and researchers started investigating too-good-to-be-true publications to identify potential fraud (e.g. Data Colada), leading to retractions that have been diligently recorded in RetractionWatch. These are just a few of the hundreds of initiatives that were undertaken to sanitize scientific research. Though far from perfect or sufficient to deal with all the existing problems, the Open Science movement has been a pillar of academic research in the past decade, significantly improving the quality of the produced research and educating new researchers on how to work according to more rigorous and honest norms.

Hijacking Open Science

Regrettably, Open Science principles seem to have been recently weaponized by its enemies to cast doubt in science as a whole and to support policies that undermine academic research. Trump’s executive order of 23^rd of May 2025 for “Gold Standard Science” that is “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” has alarmed scientists who worry that this is just double-speak for dismantling academic institutions according to the interests of the US president and his collaborators. In this order, Trump mentions retractions, replication issues, and conflicts of interests as supporting arguments for the need to intervene and “change things” (Tollefson and Garisto, 2025). Then, one week later, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, was asked about the decision to limit pregnant people's access to the COVID-19 vaccines, given that aggregation of studies involving a total of over 1.8 million women had shown the vaccine was safe and effective. Makary dismissed all that data because it wasn't "gold standard science" (Timmer, 2025), indicating that the gold standard rule is going to be used from now on as a keyword to dismiss whatever kind of evidence does not suit the administration’s goals and principles. In addition, within Trump’s executive order there is a call to form policies that "provide for consideration of different or dissenting viewpoints", which sounds nice but it most likely stands for the demand for equal representation of scientifically informed opinions and bogus theories (a communication strategy broadly used by climate denialists to create confusion about climate change consensus; Cook, 2019). A petition, spearheaded by the Stand Up for Science initiative, was soon signed by more than 5000 scientists, arguing that the executive order has hijacked scientific language, using open science as a trojan horse to “undermine scientific rigor and the transparent progress of science.” If you share the sentiment of the petition, you may want to add your name to the signatories and voice your concern.

References

• Candal-Pedreira, C., Ross, J. S., Ruano-Ravina, A., Egilman, D. S., Fernández, E., & Pérez-Ríos, M. (2022). Retracted papers originating from paper mills: cross sectional study. BMJ, 379.
• Cook, J. (2019). Understanding and countering misinformation about climate change. Handbook of research on deception, fake news, and misinformation online, 281-306.
• Foster, E. D., & Deardorff, A. (2017). Open science framework (OSF). Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, 105(2), 203.
• Head, M. L., Holman, L., Lanfear, R., Kahn, A. T., & Jennions, M. D. (2015). The extent and consequences of p-hacking in science. PLoS Biology, 13(3), e1002106.
• Ioannidis, J. P. (2005). Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine, 2(8), e124.
• Lewandowsky, S., Armaos, K., Bruns, H., Schmid, P., Holford, D. L., Hahn, U., ... & Cook, J. (2022). When science becomes embroiled in conflict: Recognizing the public’s need for debate while combating conspiracies and misinformation. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 700(1), 26-40.
• Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V., Button, K. S., Chambers, C. D., Percie du Sert, N., ... & Ioannidis, J. P. (2017). A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(1), 0021.
• Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716.
• Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.
• Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2013, January). Life after p-hacking. In Meeting of the society for personality and social psychology, New Orleans, LA (pp. 17-19).
• Timmer, J. (2025, June 2). Analysis: Trump’s “Gold Standard Science” is already wearing thin. Ars TECHNICA. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/analysis-trumps-gold-standard-science-is-already-wearing-thin/