Open science: from theory to practices (Ukrainian and Chinese perspectives)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the analysis of how the ideas of Open Science find their way to the research practices in higher educational institutions, particularly in the examples of Ukraine and China. It is revealed that at the moment most researchers do not possess adequate information about the concept of Open Science, its guidelines are almost absent from regulatory documents and strategies for the development of HEIs, and they just start to appear in plans and declarations of the national level. It is shown that for now only the practices of implementing the lower “procedural” aspect of Open Science, in particular the development of open access to data and information, are in the focus of attention at both national and institutional levels, while the support for the values of democracy and academic freedom mostly remains a declaration. Open Science is argued to be not just the promotion of open access and the building of the corresponding infrastructure, but the whole paradigm of openness and democratization of research practices, including their decentralization and the abandonment of the externally imposed orientation on quantitative and formal indicators of the research effectiveness. It is found to be especially difficult to implement the values of academic freedom and democracy declared in normative documents and development strategies into everyday research practice considering the centralized traditions of management peculiar to many countries of the world, including Ukraine and China. Still, some of the practices that are being more or less successfully realized in China and other countries of the Southeast Asian region, which are at approximately the same stage of movement from excessive centralization of the higher education system to its democratization, are argued to be useful as examples for Ukraine.