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The ideology of post-positivism that anchors the dominant strands of the sciences/social sciences (including in Communication Studies) sees this as a crisis.
Any form of crisis-making is political work. We should be therefore asking, for whom is replicability a crisis? For what reasons is replicability a crisis?
It is a crisis because the framework of hypothesis-making that dominates the sciences/social sciences works on the ideology of generalizability. This impulse of generalizing forms the colonial infrastructure of White knowledge systems that legitimize themselves through the expansion of the colonizing gaze, bringing the bodies, lived experiences, and narrative accounts of the global margins under the colonizing gaze, reduced to data to be deployed by the colonizer.
Data here are political. Data have always been political. They serve as instruments within the colonial architecture.
Ask the colonized peoples of the Global South and the colonized peoples in settler colonies of the Global North, and they will regale you with stories of colonial expansion that work through the turning of our bodies, lived experiences, biologies, ecosystems, and knowledge formations into data.
The very problematization of replicability as a "crisis" is then embedded in the logics of Whiteness, on the hegemonic norms of knowledge making that are integral to the colonizing process.
The movement for open science then emerges from within the normative structures of this crisis, positioned as responding to the crisis. Responses such as pre-registration, registering the methodology before embarking on the study, are presented as "fixes" to the problem, replicating and further entrenching the Whiteness of disciplines. The fundametal question, "Open for whom?" is strategically and tactically erased.
Context is a barrier to knowledge production or one to be incorporated into the structures of Whiteness that constitute open science.
Quickly, anticipating the challenge from interpretivists, a nod is made to context. As if to accommodate qualitative researchers (also often embedded in the structures of Whiteness), processes are laid out for offering detailed accounts of how qualitative studies are carried out so they can be held up to the standards of open science.
Yet, the question of accommodating interpretivism doesn't really get to the heart of the problem of Whiteness that makes up the politics of problematization and solution development within the open science movement. As colonial structures work, inherent in the formulation of open science is the hierarchy of knowledge making.
Inherent in the problematization of the "crisis" is the production and circulation of cognitive inequalities that form the infrastructures of White/colonial knowledge production. They work to exclude and to erase, forming the basis of epistemicide, the active erasure of the cognitive capacities of peoples of the Global South. We should be therefore asking: Who is doing the problematizing? Who is participating in the conversations on problematizing?With what agendas? In what discursive formations? To serve whose interests? Obfuscated are fundamental questions of inequalities in the distribution of power and material resources, and the ways in which these inequalities are tied to the project of Science.
Paradoxically, the discourse of Open Science works through a fundamental act of communicative inversion, framing these extractive and colonizing processes as emancipatory.
The demand for openness strategically erases the long histories of colonial theft of indigenous knowledge formations and indigenous systems, including forms of biopiracy and biotheft. Across the Global South, indigenous movements for sovereignty (including knowledge sovereignty), understanding fully well the colonizing project that steals indigenous knowledge, often work through the safeguarding of indigenous knowledge. In my own work in the Global South, the question of sovereignty often is deeply tied to resisting the colonial expansion by strategically placing barriers to forms of knowledge so they are not easily stolen by the colonizer. It is in such instances in dismantling the expansionary logics of White colonialism that indigenous sovereignty sees its future of sustenance.
Within the spaces of Communication Studies then, a decolonizing reading of open science ought to closely interrogate the very processes of decision-making through which open science emerges as a problem, and then attaches itself to specific forms of solution-making. For instance, if disciplinary knowledge formations including our Communication Associations move toward pre-registering, we ought to closely interrogate the politics underlying the pre-registering.
How does pre-registering further Whiten our journals which are fundamentally so White? What are the additional and new challenges to scholars of colour from the Global South imposed by the logics of pre-registration? What new logics of exclusion and marginalization does pre-registration introduce? These discussions must be held by scholars of colour, indigenous scholars, scholars from the margins, and scholars from the Global South rather than being debated by the White scholars that dominate and hold control over the structures of knowledge production.
We ought to interrogate the discursive architectures and spaces in which decisions have been/are being made. How have spaces been created for scholars of colour, for indigenous scholars, for scholars from the margins to participate in the conversations on open science (take a close look at the disciplinary formations where these debates and conversations are being held)? What is the raced architecture of this discussion? Have these spaces of decision making (including publications committees, boards etc.) been made open to the Global South? How have these spaces reproduced the colonial architectures of the discipline? What forms of knowledge generation does this agendas erase in its articulation of openness?
It is indeed a fundamental paradox when the ideology of openness is propped up through a process that is closed and opaque, embedded within the legacy of colonialism.