Köchling, Stella | Germany

Stella is a researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Hanover and a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication studies at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on the role of digital transformation in scholarly communication and evaluation. From an organizational perspective, she examines commercial and non-commercial providers of infrastructures for scholarly communication, research evaluation, and research information. She analyzes their organizational structures and communication practices taking into account developments of platformization, datafication, and the commercialization of science. Methodologically, she employs a qualitative approach and brings extensive experience in conducting expert interviews and ethnographic studies. She holds a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology and a bachelor’s degree in English Studies and Ethnology from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn.

Project at IAS-STS: Governing Open Science through collaborations: negotiating tensions between science and economy

Accompanied by digital transformation, Open Science (OS) has become not only a normative but also an institutionalized endeavor within science and research. Consequently, various organizations have been established to provide infrastructures for OS. These include commercial publishers, as well as non-commercial institutions, which have emerged in response to increasing commercialization of academia. However, these non-commercial providers collaborate with different commercial actors, such as publishers for data exchange or SMEs for service innovation and develop new use cases to transform data into assets. This research project explores the establishment, maintenance, and sustainability of collaborations between these organizations. Considering the specificities of the academic system and its commercialization, the study aims to draw conclusions on how different organizational objectives, namely, fostering OS and generating revenue, are aligned in the development of such collaborations.

Ethnographic fieldwork in a transnational, publicly funded organization providing OS infrastructures has been conducted. Participation within the organization can yield valuable insights into organizational structures and decision-making processes related to the establishment of collaborations. From the manifold data collected including documents, interview transcripts, and observation protocols, first insights suggest that different communication channels maintain the infrastructures addressing various actors (e.g. users, partners, funders, SMEs, internal employees). An integral part of this communication refers to tensions between science and economy which are reflected by the employees when it comes to collaborations with commercial actors.