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Rethinking Open Science

Rethinking Open Science Through Dependency Theory

By Batool Almarzouq

Volume 27, no. 2, Political Economy of Science

Institutional science has drifted far from the lives and priorities of ordinary people. Status and prestige matter more than the needs of communities. Universities and the funders of research incentivize paper counts, citation rankings, and impact factors—numbers that look good on a CV and polish a university’s brand but do little for anyone outside the academy. Scientific research is judged by how it performs in elite journals, not by whether it improves the lives of the people it claims to serve.1 As a response, the Open Science movement insists that research return to the public. It promotes accountability, transparency, inclusivity, and societal relevance. Practices such as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data stewardship, open source software and hardware, open peer review, citizen science collaborations, open education materials, and open access to publications and methods all fall under the umbrella of Open Science.2

These practices challenge conventions that long sidelined local knowledge and excluded non-elite voices. The 2021 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Recommendation on Open Science, adopted by 193 member states, establishes a global framework for collaboration and democratization that traditional institutions have rarely delivered.3 The United States declared 2023 as the Year of Open Science and launched the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Transform to Open Science (TOPS) program.4 Across Europe, national and continental legislation now mandates open data sharing, collaborative research methods, active citizen involvement, and shared infrastructures such as the European Open Science Cloud.5 Law and policy have increasingly guided Open Science from the top-down, reshaping scientific culture toward what it deems societal accountability.

This article looks briefly at exclusive systems of knowledge production. I describe how the Open Science movement that was founded to reform science often recycles the same extractive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism described by dependency theory. I show that even when the Global South gains representation at the table of Open Science, they are never allowed to rewrite the rules of the game.6

Rethinking Modes of Knowledge Production

For centuries, the systems that decide what counts as scientific knowledge have shut out the Global South. Citation indexes, which define prestige and credibility, reinforced colonial hierarchies by favoring Western publications.7 A handful of commercial actors controlled the major indexes and actively maintained these divides.

African journals faced systematic exclusion. When Eugene Garfield launched the Science Citation Index in 1963, 70 percent of the 613 indexed journals came from the US and UK. Not a single African journal made the list, despite over 550 active African journals at the time. Garfield’s “law of concentration” has roots that align with neoliberal austerity logics influencing scholarly publishing. The rise of bibliometric evaluation as a governance tool in academia mirrors the economic rationalism, competition, and market-like metrics of neoliberalism to assess research performance.8

Patterns of exclusion persist. In 2023, fewer than sixty of over 30,000 journals indexed in the Web of Science came from sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa. Scopus shows a similar imbalance.9 Thomson Reuters, Clarivate, and Elsevier have reinforced the gap through commercial priorities.10 Their profit-driven models favor English-language, well-resourced journals and marginalize publications in local languages and smaller, underfunded fields.

The claim that countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America can simply “build open science practices from the ground up” since “research is relatively new to these countries,” as suggested in Nature, fundamentally misses the point.11 These nations are trapped in a global knowledge system and dependencies controlled by the Global North, making true autonomy—or any meaningful delinking—very difficult. The Open Science movement promises inclusivity and better science but ignores the economic and political realities that shape research. Beneath the rhetoric lies a funding and governance system that reproduces the extractive patterns described by dependency theory: resources, value, and decision-making flow from the Global South (the periphery) to the Global North (the core), keeping the South subordinate in science, economics, and governance.12

The late dependency theorist Samir Amin offered a more nuanced view of these dynamics. He argued that underdevelopment in peripheral countries stems from a polarized global capitalist system. Amin’s analysis challenged the idea that scientific or economic progress can simply emerge independently—or “from the ground up”—without confronting the deep global power imbalances that keep dependency in place.13 Coloniality extends this analysis to other dimensions, including knowledge systems.14 Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo identify enduring systems of power that survived formal empire and continue to shape economics, politics, and knowledge production. Coloniality exposes how scientific frameworks are embedded with epistemic injustice and why reforms that address only symptoms fail to tackle the deeper structures. Mignolo argues that decoloniality requires “delinking” from the colonial matrix of power: rejecting Western modernity as the only model of progress and refusing global capitalism as a universal order.15

Open Science Depoliticizes Inclusion

Seen this way, the promises of Open Science demand close scrutiny. In its mainstream form, Open Science explains the Global South’s slower research pace as a matter of weak infrastructure, low capacity, or scarce resources. Diversity and inclusion shrink to questions of representation while systemic issues vanish from view. Meanwhile, the same systemic racism is recycled in the very Open Science funding structures and institutions that claim to fix it—masked by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, unconscious bias training, and pledges. Open Science places itself outside economics and politics, turning equity into a depoliticized project. Dependency theory teaches us that true allyship requires delinking and divesting from these structures—not simply bringing them into existing frameworks.

As Dolors Armenteras reflects on the growing frustration and moral frustrations faced by Global South academics when asked to join initiatives that promise inclusion through all the right words—co-production, diversity, participation—she writes in her piece “Equity in Science is a Beautiful Lie—and I’m Done Pretending”:

“When we speak up or decline to participate, we are told we misunderstood, are too sensitive or—worse—are hurting collaboration. But every time we contribute, or simply stay silent, we help the current system to survive. I won’t do that anymore… We should stop mistaking access for change and stop apologizing for wanting more than just symbolic inclusion. I do not want to be invited back into rooms that keep the power intact.”16

This logic runs through mainstream DEI work in the Open Science movement. Many initiatives merely treat bias and racism as attitudes or beliefs that need to be treated and ignore the structural foundations of exploitation. Racism is never just about ideas or prejudice. It is mainly about the social rules and policies that make exploitation possible. Arun Kundnani argues that these structures produce racism as an effect, not a cause. That is why surface-level fixes like bias/DEI training or gestures of representation in DEI initiatives ignore, and reinforce, the systems that drive inequality.17

The Global North tends to cast itself as a generous donor, pointing to about 100-200 billion USD in aid each year.18 What rarely gets mentioned, though, is the ongoing pattern of extraction. Based on Hickel’s work, the Global North takes in resources worth at least 2.2 trillion USD annually from the Global South through debt repayments, profit repatriation, and unequal trade—an amount that could end extreme poverty more than fifteen times over. Over the past sixty years, this has amounted to roughly 152 trillion USD in losses when the impact on growth is considered, making the Global South a net creditor to the North and revealing the myth of Northern generosity.19 It’s a pattern that stretches back centuries.20

As Adebayo Olukoshi states, “Underdevelopment was not a natural state from which African and other countries could escape only by following the path trodden by the developed countries… The issue was a wholesale redefinition of the relationships that produced development for one party and underdevelopment for the other.”21 This explains why the per-capita income gap between the Global North and the Global South has continued widening since the 1960s despite decades of aid.22

Figure credit: Jason Hickle.

Figure 1. GDP per capita (2010 USD) in the Global North and Global South, 1960–2017. Created by Huzaifa Zoomkawala for Jason Hickel, using World Bank national accounts data. First published in Jason Hickel (2019).

Every dollar lost cuts local capacity for research, education, and innovation. It leaves universities and researchers in the Global South at a deficit, dependent on Western funding schemes.

The strength of critical political economy and dependency theory lies in insisting on material realities—the economic and political forces that shape global inequality—rather than treating science as if it exists in a vacuum. This becomes clear when we look at how governance and funding for Open Science remain tightly concentrated in Northern institutions and philanthropic giants. For example, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), through its Open Science program, has committed $46.6 million in targeted grants alongside an additional $51.8 million through the Essential Open Source Software for Science initiative, making it one of the largest grant donors in open science. At the same time, CZI presents itself as a philanthropic organization independent from Meta, with a strong emphasis on DEI and on supporting grassroots efforts in the Global South.23 That separation collapsed in 2025 when US President Trump’s return to office prompted CZI to drop its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in lockstep with Meta.24 This episode shows that so-called “neutral” and large Open Science funders are vulnerable to politics and deeply embedded in a flawed system.

Unequal exchange, whereby underdeveloped countries get far less value for their exports than they pay for imports from wealthy nations, is today extended to digital colonialism. Open data, natural resources, and low-cost labor from the Global South are extracted by AI and tech companies in the Global North, often without fair pay or meaningful control by local communities.25 Workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America perform critical tasks like data annotation and content moderation under precarious and unsafe conditions. At the same time, Northern corporations dominate AI infrastructure, data centers, and intellectual property, keeping the Global South dependent, conditioned, and locked out of decision-making.26

Open Science initiatives, even when well-meaning, often overlook these material imbalances. They promote open data and access, yet the same initiatives contribute to the economic and political ties that sustain disadvantage—giving with one hand while taking with ten others. Without actively delinking and divesting from these structures of economic and academic extraction, discussions of inclusivity remain hollow, and the socioeconomic gap described by dependency theory will only widen.

Normalizing Architecture of Academic Violence

The material and political inequalities embedded in Open Science are mirrored in the very institutions that promote it. Universities promoting Open Science operate in a clear contradiction; they call for global knowledge sharing while funding the destruction of knowledge systems in the Global South. Many leading US universities involved in Open Science also have extensive ties to the defense sector. For instance, Johns Hopkins University, home to the Applied Physics Laboratory, has received over 3 and 1.75 billion USD in contracts from the US Department of Defense for research with military applications, including dual-use technologies.27 Even Dutch universities, often praised for progressive and open research practices, face scrutiny: major pension funds linked to these institutions have invested over a billion euros in arms manufacturers tied to operations that violate human rights.28 Weapons and technologies funded through these channels have directly caused devastating consequences in the Global South. These funds have destroyed all eleven universities in Gaza, cutting off higher education for more than 90,000 Palestinian students and erasing decades of accumulated knowledge.29 This reality highlights the limits of Open Science’s promises of inclusivity and global knowledge sharing when it operates within deeply unequal global power structures.

Researchers from the Global South often have to work with institutions that profit from their destruction in order to gain visibility. Palestinian academics seeking international recognition face an impossible choice: collaborate with universities that invest in their oppression or remain invisible in global academic networks. The system rests not only on bias and extraction but on direct violence against the very knowledge systems it claims to democratize.

From Independence to Dependence

Some may think the Global South has always had a different, perhaps inherently inferior, economic trajectory compared to the Global North and that this gap is inevitable. History tells another story. After independence in the 1960s, governments across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East—from Egypt under Nasser to Ghana under Nkrumah—pursued economic sovereignty.30 The United States and European powers crushed these efforts through covert interventions, debt manipulation, and abrupt aid withdrawals. If those nations had retained control over their resources, their populations would not face today’s systemic impoverishment or dependence on Global North funding.31

Kwame Nkrumah exposed these dynamics decades before dependency theory entered academic debate in his book “Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism.” Released while he was Ghana’s president, the book provoked swift retaliation from the US State Department, which pulled $25 million USD in American “aid.”32 Since then, the global political economy has locked in neoliberal policies that reinforce extractive relationships.

Time to Revisit the Priorities of Open Science

The movement behind Open Science emerged with noble aims and genuine intentions but has evolved into a flawed reality. The goal of open science is not openness itself; it’s about redistributing power in knowledge production—challenging the extractive systems that enrich the Global North at the expense of the Global South. Real change requires actively divesting from and delinking with the economic engines that Open Science systematically ignores or even relies upon. To fail in this is to betray everything the movement claims to stand for.

Recognizing that the current system is neither natural nor inevitable is the first step. We should not reduce Open Science to technical problems that we “attempt” to fix with yet another technical tool and ignore the power dynamics. Every call for open data, open-source, and open access must be paired with divestment from tech corporations exploiting low-wage labor across the Global South, the arms industries funding university endowments and from multinational mining companies extracting South American resources. Open access journals that profit from these exploitative networks are far from truly open. They are gatekeepers of inequality dressed in progressive garb. True allyship means asking the difficult questions that are often left out of Open Science discourse and spaces. It means breaking ties with the networks that sustain occupation and oppression, rather than accepting or normalizing a structure built on exploitation.

As Ha-Joon Chang remarked, quoting Dom Hélder Câmara: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”33 History shows that collective action can transform deeply rooted systems, and organizing energy must now drive a fundamental shift in scientific culture. It is time for Open Science to revisit its priorities and deliver on its promise.

—

Batool Almarzouq plays at the crossroads of open science, transdisciplinarity, and systems thinking. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Liverpool in biomedical sciences and advocates for open science through decolonial approaches that question Eurocentric standards, challenge extractive legacies, widen shared agency, and support decentralised knowledge-production grounded in equitable governance and validation of diverse ways of knowing across regions and cultures.

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Notes

  1. Giovanni De Grandis and Anne Blanchard, eds., The Fragility of Responsibility: Norway’s Transformative Agenda for Research, Innovation and Business (Cham: Springer, 2024).
  2. Center for Open Science, “What is Open Science?” accessed October 9, 2025.
  1. UNESCO, Recommendation on Open Science (2021).
  2. NASA, Transform to Open Science (TOPS) (2023).
  3. European Commission, Open Science. Research and Innovation, June 19, 2025.
  4. The term “Global Majority” is increasingly used as an alternative to “Global South” to emphasize that roughly 80 percent of the world’s population resides in these regions. Whereas “Global South” emerged primarily as a geopolitical and economic category to describe countries historically subjected to colonialism and uneven development, the phrase “Global Majority” highlights demographic reality while also challenging Eurocentric framings that marginalize most of the world’s peoples.
  5. For more reading about epistemic diversity, see: David Ludwig, Fabio Gatti, and Esther Milberg Muñiz, “Reclaiming Epistemic Diversity: Between Community Struggles and Corporate Capture,” Science for the People 26, no. 2 (2024).
  6. If you want to explore further the exclusion of African journal articles from major global indexes and the ongoing struggle of the African academic community to gain visibility, it is highly recommended to read: David Mills and Temitope Asubiaro, “Does the African Academy Need Its Own Citation Index?” Global Africa, no. 7 (2024): 115–25.
  7. T. V. Asubiaro, S. Onaolapo, and D. Mills, “Regional Disparities in Web of Science and Scopus Journal Coverage,” Scientometrics129, no. 3 (2024): 1469–1491.
  8. T. V. Asubiaro and S. Onaolapo, “A Comparative Study of the Coverage of African Journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 74, no. 7 (2023): 745–758.
  9. S. Onie, “Redesign Open Science for Asia, Africa and Latin America,” Nature 587 (2020): 35–37.
  10. Dependency theory is a broad field of scholarship, including Marxist, neo-Marxist, and structuralist approaches. At its core, it examines how global capitalism favors core countries at the expense of the periphery. For a quick, accessible overview beyond Andre Gunder Frank, see: Crash Course Economics, “Dependency Theory and Uneven Development.”
  11. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989); Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, ed., Dependency Theory: Its Enduring Relevance, Young Scholars Initiative Series (New York: Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017).
  12. M. N. Smith and C. A. Lester, “From ‘Dependency’ to ‘Decoloniality’? The Enduring Relevance of Materialist Political Economy and the Problems of a ‘Decolonial’ Alternative,” Social Dynamics 49, no. 2 (2023): 196–219.
  13. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215–232; Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
  14. Dolors Armenteras, “Equity in Science Is a Beautiful Lie—and I’m Done Pretending,” Nature 645 (2025): 561.
  15. Arun Kundnani, What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2021).
  16. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Official Development Assistance (ODA),” OECD, accessed October 9, 2025.
  17. Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala, “Plunder in the Post-Colonial Era: Quantifying Drain from the Global South Through Unequal Exchange, 1960–2018,” New Political Economy (2021). For more, see Jason Hickel’s articles on debt and global inequality and The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (London: William Heinemann, 2017).
  18. Gastón Nievas and Thomas Piketty, “Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations: Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payments 1800–2025,” World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2025/11, May 27, 2025.
  19. Amin, Eurocentrism; Adebayo O. Olukoshi, “Dependency Theory: Its Enduring Relevance,” in Dependency Theory: Its Enduring Relevance, ed. Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Young Scholars Initiative Series (New York: Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017).
  20. As Jason Hickel showed in his August 6, 2019 “A Response to Noah Smith about Global Poverty” blog, “the majority of new income is being captured by the rich, and particularly by the global North. Only a very small share of it (about 5 percent) goes to the poorest 60 percent of humanity, despite the fact that they provide the majority of the labour and resources that go into the global economy.”
  21. Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) (2025).
  22. Kali Hayes, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Charity Scraps Diversity Team Despite Assurances It Wouldn’t Change Course,” The Guardian, February 19, 2025.
  23. For more information on how technological Global North exploitation displaces rather than replaces labor in the Global South, see the review of Professor Lilly Irani’s work and the Data Workers’ Inquiry available at https://data-workers.org/.
  24. Transnational Institute, Digital Colonialism: An Analysis of Europe’s Trade Agenda (2021); Transnational Institute, Digital Colonialism – Geopolitics of Data and Development (2024), video.
  25. Kristen Smith, “Johns Hopkins Lab Lands $3B MDA Contract for R&D Support,” ExecutiveGov, December 20, 2024.
  26. NL Times, “Dutch Pension Funds Investing in Companies That Supply Weapons to Israel,” NL Times, July 4, 2025.
  27. Paul Cochrane, “90,000 Students Have Lost Access to HE in Gaza – Academic,” University World News, January 16, 2025.
  28. Kvangraven, Dependency Theory (New York: Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2017), preface, iii.
  29. Nievas and Piketty, “Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations.”
  30. Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965); Kvangraven, Dependency Theory.
  31. For an accessible exploration of economic development, structural inequalities, and the contested trajectories of Global South countries compared to the Global North, see Ha-Joon Chang’s lecture series: New Economic Thinking, Economics for People, YouTube playlist, 2020.