Mirowski’s article is a critical intervention against the celebratory consensus around open science. Its iconic idea is open science as platform capitalism. Rather than assuming that openness automatically democratizes knowledge, Mirowski asks who is opening science, for what purpose, with what funding, through which platforms and under which regime of political economy. The article argues that the contemporary enthusiasm for open science often re-engineers scientific practice to fit neoliberal and platform-based logics: metrics, crowdsourcing, entrepreneurial competition, data extraction, behavioural tracking and outsourced labour. The language of openness can therefore mask a transformation in the governance of science. What appears as democratization may become a new infrastructure for market coordination, surveillance and privatized control. Mirowski’s strength is historical. He refuses the idea that science was simply closed until digital tools opened it. Scientific openness has taken different forms across different epistemic regimes. The question is not whether openness is good in abstraction, but what kind of openness is being built. The article is essential because it introduces suspicion into the open science vocabulary: openness can liberate, but it can also become the interface of capture.
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