Dear Internet Researchers, My apologies for shameless self-promotion and for possible cross-postings : if you're interested in open science and its complex relationship with software, I will talk about this topic next Wednesday : "Only the initiates will have the secrets revealed" : The politics and materialities of open science ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Käte Hamburger Kolleg "cultures of research" lecture series in Aachen and [online](https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/lecture-series/) Wednesday, January 26th, 5pm CET Open Science has been pervading the scientific world in the last decade. It is a buzzword, and a promise. First, through Open Access, as a combat against corporate publishers, then through Open Data as a mean to enhance sharing practices, and more recently, and more timidly, through the promotion of Open Software. Strikingly, Open Software in science has attracted until now less interest even though Open Science itself is rooted in 1980s free software principles. This talk focuses on software in science and its diversity of entanglements with openness. Software has been "eating" the world and science is no exception. From Excel to complex "big" scientific instruments, via Photoshop or molecular modelling software suites, the vast majority of software used in science is not open, and a vast majority has nothing to do with computer science. When software is open, it is very often naively represented as a solution to all issues in science, especially reproducibility. Yet, even open software is full of epistemic issues, from governance to consistency, and the consequences of its influence on the rest of open science are often misunderstood, especially regarding licensing policies. -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré & RWTH c:o/re https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/fellows/prof-alexandre-hocquet/ ***********************************************