UC Riverside

In 2015, an article published in the journal Science set off what some regarded as a crisis of confidence which quickly swept across several social and natural sciences disciplines. The study suggested that two-thirds of the experiments published in three leading social psychology journals were non-reproducible in other labs. My ethnographic research project is based on several months of fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2018 at one of the organizations involved with carrying out and publishing this reproducibility study, a relatively small but influential software technology, culture-change, and research non-profit based on the U.S. East Coast. I explore how a small group of dedicated and passionate computer programmers, researchers, and marketers work to expand access and transparency across entire research workflows and lifecycles. While these cognitive laborers work to align support infrastructures and research incentives with ideals of scientific practice, I argue that contemporary capitalist research structures have already made researchers and research products open-ended, modular, and flexible subjects. As a transdisciplinary figure of Scientific research becomes fixed, I argue for considering open science as a matter of social reproduction as much as decentralizing research media and workflow infrastructure.