‘Vorauseilender Gehorsam’ and making open science ‘unpolitical’

Science that’s not just made by and for white men is under more-than-usual attack these days, thanks to the new administration in the USA under the leadership of Trump/Musk, which made a directive to remove all mentions and funding for initiatives relating to diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) on January 22, 2025.

Of course, it’s somewhat unsurprising that federal agencies would comply with this, given their status: The National Science Foundation started reviewing the grants they gave out for “illegal” mentions of DEI. And as Jeroen Bosman noticed, NASA went ahead removing their Transform to Open Science courses that they were supposedly very proud of and that were “designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations, and communities to an inclusive culture of open science”.

And it’s even unsurprising to me that a private funder, that was started thanks to its own member of the billionaire-class, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute would have no spine – and would drop their efforts to make more inclusive & diverse science. And yes, that at least some academic societies like the American Society for Microbiology would follow along is maybe also not too surprising. After all, large parts of science have always been opportunistic as long as research money and opportunities follow.

But there has been one exception of an organization that has surprised me. Which is SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). In a conversation on Mastodon, Jeroen Bosman mentioned that SPARC had removed all references to equity from their pages between 17-22 January. When I read this, I was not only surprised but overcome by a deep sadness for an organization I at least used to put a lot of trust and faith in – and didn’t even want to believe it at first. So I used the compare-Tool of the Internet Archive, and what can I say, you have to see it for yourself.

Click to view in large, and see actual diff on the Internet Archive

Click to view in large, and see actual diff on the Internet Archive

Seeing these changes – a wholesale removal of their goal of working to build “new norms, practices, and policies for knowledge sharing that address the ways in which racism, colonialism, and other forms of discrimination limit whose voices are heard, whose interests are prioritized, and whose knowledge counts” alongside the removal of their commitment to “designing equity and inclusion into the foundation of the work that” – is… …I’m not sure I can find the right words for it. Disheartening? Bleak? Infuriating?

But what makes SPARC different from those other organizations? Well see, SPARC used to run a quite successful annual conference for many years, called OpenCon (ironically, they seem to so far have forgotten to remove the EDI-aspects from that page, which still states that OpenCon works to make research & education more open and equitable). Between at least 2015-2018, these conferences ran as in-person events to bring together young/emerging leaders around open topics and help them form connections, learn from each other and lobby. I attended the editions in 2015 in Brussels and 2016 in Washington (fun fact: my face is even on the cover image for the photo section of the 2016 conference).

What set OpenCon apart from many other open science-themed conferences was its lived commitment to EDI: When the 2016 conference took place in Washington just a week after the first time Trump was elected, a lot of the conversations focused on EDI. And if memory serves, it was one of the reasons why the conferences going forward were held outside the US. In 2017, they also ran a panel on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open (for which the recordings have by now also disappeared from YouTube). And they even did a whole self-critical report about EDI at their conference to learn and improve, and removed people from their community for breaking the Code of Conduct.

All of this to say: One might be forgiven for thinking that SPARC as an organization had some actual values around equity, diversity & inclusion. But now it seems to turn out that this commitment was at best skin-deep.

Which brings me to the title of this post: “Vorauseilender Gehorsam” is a German term that roughly translates to “obedience that hurries ahead”. A less cumbersome translation for the concept has more recently been popularized in the English-speaking world by Timothy Snyder: Anticipatory obedience or obeying in advance. The concept describes how people voluntarily engage in behaviors that they think are expected from them, to effectively preempt any peer-pressure or negative consequences. Of course, the canonical example of this is Nazi Germany.

Now, I obviously don’t know if SPARC was not visited by some henchmen in service of the currently ongoing coup in the US. But let’s say I strongly doubt it. More likely, at least to me, there’s been a worry about future funding opportunities given the change in who holds the purse-strings. And so some anticipatory obedience might have been the perceived “best” way forward. Of course, ultimately it doesn’t make a difference. Just as whether folks in Germany in the 1930s/40s were committed Nazis, Mitläufer, or just profiteers didn’t matter in the long run. Today, they are all given the same label.

Similarly, the motivations don’t really matter today either, as the outcomes are the same. Open Science has claimed to carry the mantle of equity, inclusion, and diversity for a long while. To have any legitimacy, it needs to hold onto those values and act on the resulting responsibilities. Just like science itself, open science can not be unpolitical – but it can decide to just serve the far-right interests of those in power. So, when organizations that acted like allies such as SPARC just fold, we should remember their actions and not forgive them.

And maybe we should all keep an eye on other open science organizations, especially those with ties to big tech.

In semi-related news & to not be all doom & gloom: The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (an all-volunteer organization where I’m one of the volunteer board-members) is not only continuing to run its Event Fellowship to support typically under-represented demographics to attend events that relate to open source/science & bioinformatics – We’ve also recently increased the funding cap to US $1,500.