Open Science as an Engine of Anxiety: How Scientists Promote and Defend the Visibility of Their Digital Selves, while Becoming Fatalistic about Academic Careers
Authors: Reinhart Martin 
Published: May 2021

Science, as a professional field, produces extreme forms of inequality.Most young and aspiring scientists who sucessfully complete their tertiaryeducation and go on to train as a PhD or doctoral student, never make it tobecoming a 'working scientist'. Most of those who do become postdocs,never make it to becoming a tenured professor. And most of those whobecome professors, never make it to becoming famous in their field,receiving prestigeous prices or even being highly cited. Careers in scienceare a trial of attrition, where only the best (or the luckiest?) prevail in thecompetition for careers. Scientists themselves tend to believe, generally, thatscience is a meritocracy, with the most productive being selected along thesecareer junctures. While there is no logical contradiction between meritocracyand competitivity and while many scientists believe that the meritocraticideal explains and justifies the high competitivity sufficiently, there is at leastsome ambivalence. Robert K. Merton (1973) noted the general ambivalencethat results from the interplay between the normative structure and thereward system in science. Since then it is not just the increased competitivityand the rising inequalities, that have changed; more importantely, it is theway visibility regimes have been changing over the last 20 years, mainly dueto digital communication, that has forced scientists to acknowledge theambivalence inherent in the meritocratic narrative. This essay is an attemptto explore this ambivalence, which, as of yet, has no ready-made description.A first way of describing this ambivalence may start from a series offirst-person accounts, empirical research results, and theoretical insights, thatcome from an emerging literature on the subject. Science as an “engine ofanxiety” (Espeland and Sauder, 2016; Fochler, Felt and Müller, 2016),“imposter syndrome” (Loveday, 2018; Grey, 2020; Keogh, 2020), “publish-or-perish” (Dalen and Henkens, 2012; Rijcke et al., 2016), or just“ambivalence” (Flink &amp; Simon 2014) are some of the terms used to describea perceived shift in research cultures, where meritocracy and competitivityhave lost balance. This literature refers to processes of quantification(Desrosières, 1998), medialization (Weingart, 1999), projectification (Torka,2009, 2018; Franssen et al., 2018), or to significant shifts from blockfunding to temporary and third-party-funding. The result of theseoverlapping and sometimes mutually reinforcing processes is felt byindividual researchers as a source of anxiety, leading to feelings ofinadequacy, and, ultimately, to the belief that science may be more of alottery than a meritocracy (Loveday, 2018; Reinhart and Schendzielorz,2020). It is easy to dismiss these feelings as the reactions of those who havelost out in the competition for recognition. That would, however, bepremature for two reasons. First, these feelings may still be a reaction to ashift in research cultures, irrespective of whether this reaction is deemedadequate or not. Second, these feelings and beliefs have become a relevantforce in movements and policy initiatives that push for such diverse goals asmore reproducibility of research results, more gender equality and diversityin academia, or more careful use of quantitative indicators in the (self-)governance of science. To address these issues, my argument in this essay will ,first, describe the ambivalence in a current understanding of science both as competitiveand meritocratic, by relating it to changes in scientific visibility regimes.Second, I will briefly discuss the theoretical concepts that emerge from sucha description, mainly 'visibility', 'background emotions', and 'digital selves'.Third, I will lay out one strategy that highly visible individual scientistsseem to employ, to deal with the ambivalence of these new visibilityregimes. Finally, forth, I will discuss what the ensuing politics in sciencemight be, that result collectively from such individual strategies. Theargument will result in a paradox: The current visibility regime in science, resulting from digital communication and online platforms, leads toexcitement among scientists over the possibilities for attaininghypervisibility. Increasingly, however, the excitement of fashioning digitalselves is taken over by anxiety over being exposed to the possibility ofnegative, reputation threatening attention. Pardoxically, anticipating andpreventing such a possibility leads to even more vigorous fashioning ofdigital selves, for which the open science movement provides the mostsuitable policy narrative. In short: to protect themselves from the possiblenegative effects of visibility, scientists push for more visibility; whilebecoming fatalistic about their careers and about science policy.