The weaponization of 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 reform 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 and to also start 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. The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) were established to ensure that studies are easily replicable and that data can be used by other researchers for other purposes with minimal effort. Some researchers even 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. In addition, researchers have organized national and international open science communities in order to ensure that the open science principles were adhered to and to develop and establish processes that will further advance studies' quality and reproducibility:

• International networks for Open Science:
  • the Center for Open Science: COS,
  • the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities: INOSC,
  • the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training: FORRT,

• National Reproducibility networks: in United Kingdom: UKRN, in Germany: GRN, in France: FRRN, in Spain: SPRN, in Italy: ITRN, in Netherlands: NLRN and Open Science NL, in Switzerland: SwissRN, in Denmark: DKRN, and in Portugal: PTRN.
• In Germany, a host of initiatives have been created, focusing on different disciplines and methodologies. A concise collection of links to these initiatives can be found at: Stifterverband.org. Notably, the Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) coordinates efforts to develop and organize national research data infrastructure.

Similarly, almost all universities have now included open science principles in their ethics evaluation process and many have even created open science These are just a few of the hundreds of initiatives that were and are 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 (EO) 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).

Science on the defensive

Soon after Trump's EO, a petition, spearheaded by the Stand Up for Science initiative (see also their declaration in Nature), 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: https://www.standupforscience.net/open-letter-in-support-of-science.

The Center for Open Science, in response to Trump's EO, released a statement that made it clear that the EO misconstrues the meaning of open science principles (they are supposed to be guiding goals, not evaluation criteria), missunderstands the way research is done (rigorous progress is achieved through the accumulating evidence by numerous studies, it is not possible to be present in each and every study), and, as a result, sets unrealistic standards which can be used to ignore scientific evidence and to "use ideology and non-scientific information by holding it to no standards at all". This will result in centralized control of the scientific endeavor, limiting academic freedom and manipulating science to serve political agendas.

Shortly after the EO was released, by the State Department, researchers Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann and Brian Nosek published an opinion paper in the Guardian, in which they declared that Science is under siege. They argued that ""instead of being about open science, [the EO] grants administration-aligned political appointees the power to designate any research as scientific misconduct based on their own “judgment” and includes the power to punish the scientists involved accordingly". They drew the analogy to Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet researcher favored by Stalin, whose ideological obsession against genetic inheritance led to the firing, imprisonment, or death of disagreeing scientists and the destruction of the agricultural research. This EO has the potential, they argued, to create similar power monstrosities that can have detrimental effects to the environment and humanity.

In another recent opinion article in Science, researchers Brian Nosek, Joe Bak-Coleman, Stephen Lewandowsky, Berna Devezer, and Kevin Bird were interviewed and they noted that the open science reform movement should have seen coming this hijacking by the enemies of science and they could have taken steps to safeguard it from their malicious attacks. They all agreed that the term crisis opened Pandora's box and allowed misinterpretations that could serve specific anti-science narratives in casting doubt on science legitimacy. They also argue that not all disciplines suffer equally from the issues identified by the reform movement. Now, the conservative think tanks are using the Open Science reform efforts to declare that science as a whole is in crisis and needs restructuring and monitoring by political and private entities, thus endangering academic freedom and scientific integrity. They concluded that "the executive order should be a wake-up call for science reformers to communicate more carefully."

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/