Open science as cultural change and defense of national sovereignty in the Brazilian scientific publishing ecosystem

Abstract

This paper adopts multi-sited ethnographic research and the anthropology of documents to map the scientific publishing environment and Brazilian public policies for Open Science, such as the SciELO Program and the CAPES Journal Portal. The empirical corpus is based on the analysis of reports, national and global regulatory frameworks – such as the UNESCO Recommendation –, and governmental commitments under the Open Government Partnership (OGP). The theoretical framework articulates the concepts of cultural change (Robbins, 2007) and audit cultures (Strathern, 2000) with a critique of the international division of intellectual labor (Connell, 2012). Additionally, it employs the analysis of historical semantics (Koselleck, 2006) to investigate disputes over knowledge as a common good (Boltanski, Thévenot, 2020) and the horizons of political and social projection of the scientific community (Appadurai, 2013). The ethnography demonstrates that, while technologies of bureaucratic governance and formal audit risk reducing scientific autonomy to performance metrics, the adoption of cooperative and public infrastructures acts as a resistance to the privatization of knowledge. The strengthening of Diamond Open Access emerges as a strategy of democratization and national sovereignty to prevent the commercial appropriation of state-funded knowledge and to ensure equitable participation for countries considered peripheral. Preliminarily, it concludes that ensuring control, local governance, and public ownership over digital platforms for scientific circulation is an indispensable condition for preserving the country's intellectual heritage and sustaining inclusive democratic futures.