CfP: Research Topic: Public Research and Private Knowledge – Science in Times of Diverse Research Funding
Description
The
production and distribution of knowledge is a key process in scientific and
scholarly inquiry. However, this process is not and has never been limited to
universities and public research institutes alone, but extends to agents as
diverse as the Research & Development Departments of companies, citizen
scientists, and private non-profit research institutes. In recent years, these
agents have shown an increased interest in basic ˗ as opposed to applied ˗
science, for example in fields of rising social significance such as AI or
biomedical technology. These specific research interests in turn direct
attention to the sources of funding, and, as a consequence, to the direction of
inquiry and the accessibility of results. The main problem that arises from
this development can be expressed in two questions: First, does the influence
of private funding change the selection of research topics in an epistemically
or otherwise (un-) desirable direction? And second, does it lead to a
privatization of knowledge, and if so, what are the consequences of this
privatization?
Some key questions in this area of
investigation are:
• Where do
new sources of research funding come from, and how important a role do they
play? Which agents foster the development, which methods do they use, and what
are their primary motivations?
• What are
the epistemic consequences, and who is affected by them? What is the impact of
business interests on epistemic norms and ideals, and are there any
(additional) sources of bias to be expected?
• Have
there been any (changes of) institutional structures in the last decades that
have stimulated or hindered these tendencies? Which historical idea of science
is at stake? Which factors affected the practices of organizing the production
and distribution of scientific knowledge during the second half of the 20th
century?
• Is
academic freedom threatened by these developments, and if so, to what extent?
How could it be maintained? What are the epistemic effects of endowment chairs
and industry-sponsored PhD projects?
Contributions
may approach these and related questions from various disciplinary perspectives
such as philosophy of science, history of science, science and technology
studies, social epistemology, and formal epistemology.
Submission:
Contributions
must be original and may not be under review elsewhere. Extended abstracts
should be no longer than 1000 words and describe the topic, structure, and
argument of the paper. We will invite the submission of full manuscripts, based
on the quality of the extended abstract. All manuscripts will be subject to
single-blind peer-review.
Deadlines
Abstracts:
29 March 2020
Manuscripts:
31 July 2020
Keywords:
public
research, private research, research funding, private knowledge, research
grants, business interests, scientific knowledge, academic freedom,
epistemology
Important Note:
All
contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section
and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission
statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to
a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.