Stephan Lewandowsky warns that academics can ‘lose control’ of their data and see it used as ‘political propaganda’.
“Openness and transparency facilitate science, and obstruct climate science.” That’s all you need to know.
Via The World University Rankings:
Independent national bodies should be set up to adjudicate on how much of the data underpinning research needs to be released to satisfy scholarly needs while preventing its being used as “disinformation”, a leading academic has said.
Stephan Lewandowsky, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, told the World Conference on Research Integrity that “open data is highly political” and that there is a danger that some people will use scholarly information as “noise, nonsense, commercial interests or political propaganda”, to further their own interests.
“There is a difference between evidence-based science on the one hand, and political noise on the other,” he told delegates at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It was unfortunate, he went on, that openness and transparency facilitate science but at the same time they “disproportionately also aid in the dissemination of noise and politically motivated disinformation”.
Open science meant that academics no longer had jurisdiction over their data, Professor Lewandowsky said, and people could now “cherry-pick” the bits that they wanted for their own ends.