ON-MERRIT at the EASST/4S 2020 conference

2020-08-25

ON-MERRIT took part in the EASST/4S 2020 conference titled “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerging worlds”. EASST is the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, where 4S is the Society for Social Studies of Science. Like many other events in 2020, the conference happened virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our colleagues Stefan Reichmann and Bernhard Wieser from TU Graz submitted the abstract “Between Uptake and Rigour – Dilemmas of Open Science”, and on August 19th, 2020 they had the chance to present their ongoing work in ON-MERRIT. Both lead the project work package that investigates the relationship between research and policymaking; to better identify the key issues, some crucial research questions to help understand that relationship have been developed, such as:

• Are Open Science outputs used in policymaking, and if so, how?
• To what extent does the adoption of Open Science practices affect the adoption of scientific knowledge by policymakers?
• Why use scientific knowledge in policy?

ON-MERRIT contributes to the discussion by identifying the existing barriers to effective use of Open Science research in policymaking through a systematic literature review on uptake of research by policymakers, and by exploring alternative ways of framing the relationship between scientific knowledge production and policymaking.

You can read the abstract on the conference website, and the presentation is available on Zenodo.