Seminar
CANCELLED: Equality of Access Requires Equity in Design: Rethinking Open Science Infrastructures
- Date
- Friday 30 January 2026
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Willem Einthoven
Kolffpad 1
2333 BN Leiden
Unfortunately, this seminar had to be cancelled due to sickness. A new date will follow soon.
About the seminar
The 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science underscored the global commitment to Open Science. The declaration defines Open Science through the values of inclusivity and equity and the principle of sustainability. This commitment to equity hinges on a key implicit assumption, namely that diverse stakeholders around the world will be able to add value to their lives by accessing and applying the resources made available through Open Science infrastructures and practices.
Despite these strong commitments, engagement around what equitable access to open resources looks like in practice is low. Lessons from development studies and ICT4D illustrate the limitations of framings such as online/offline, or the “digital divide”. Being able to meaningfully utilise available online resources is influenced by a range of other technical, infrastructural, cultural and geo-political factors.
In this talk we will present our research on infrastructural equity. Using computational methods we have tested access to open infrastructures from different locations around the world. Our data illustrates a highly heterogeneous landscape of accessibility of open resources that links to the design decisions inherent in these infrastructures and the contexts in which they are trying to be used.
We would like these data to initiate a discussion on how to integrate equity-driven thinking into the design, deployment and support of open science infrastructures. How can we ensure that infrastructures are not geo-blocked to specific countries? How can we support use of infrastructures in low-bandwidth settings? How can we enable engagement with infrastructures through diverse ICT devices? In short, how can we ensure that the equal access to open resources is supported by equity in infrastructure design?
About the speaker
Louise Bezuidenhout is a social science researcher who specializes on issues relating to Open Science, data sharing and access. Her research is broadly oriented around themes such as justice and access, inclusion and marginalization and equity. Much of her work to date has concentrated on understanding diverse voices and values within the Open Science movement, in particular identifying ways to improve the representation and inclusion of low/middle-income country researchers into the Open Science landscape. This work has involved embedded ethnographies, interviews and surveys in a number of countries in Africa, Europe and North America.
Dr Bezuidenhout holds PhDs in cardiothoracic surgery (University of Cape Town, RSA) and sociology (University of Exeter, UK). She has had postdoctoral research posts at the Universities of Exeter (UK), Notre Dame (USA), Oxford (UK) and Cape Town (RSA). She has also held lectureships at University College London (UK), University of the Witwatersrand (RSA) and the University of Oxford (UK). Dr Bezuidenhout currently works for the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) at the University of Leiden as a senior researcher focusing on Open Science monitoring and practice.