Anticipating Knowledge Applicability in Open Science Through Recycling, Mimicking, and Shortcutting

Open science literature scrutinizes how organizations provide access to knowledge. Yet, much less is known about how organizations pursuing open science for societal impact anticipate knowledge applicability—that shared knowledge is reusable for other organizations and individuals, and enables open social innovation. Mobilizing a practice perspective on open science, we investigate how organizations create knowledge that is applicable for participation and further use. Focusing on vaccine research and development during the COVID-19 pandemic, we zoom in on five organizations that pursue open science with the goal of making vaccines available worldwide. We identify three practices of creating knowledge that the organizations employ when doing open science. They recycle accessible knowledge, mimic vaccine designs, and shortcut parts of the approval processes. Beyond facilitating accessibility, these practices create knowledge to support knowledge applicability: they constitute a relation between knowledge creation and sharing that anticipates multiple contexts for the reuse of knowledge. The paper argues that the resulting ‘anticipatory applicability’ leverages open science for societal impact.