Recycling, Mimicking, and Sidestepping: How Organizations Strategize Open Science

Literature on open science has elaborated how organizations treat emerging and potentially novel knowledge as an output of their scientific research. Yet, the input side, the usage and creation of knowledge as an input for disseminating results along an open science strategy is widely overlooked. Mobilizing a strategy-as-practice lens to theorize the phenomenon of ‘doing open science’, this paper investigates organizations’ practices of handling knowledge as an input instead of solely the output of an open science research process. Empirically looking at the context of pharmaceutical vaccine production during the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic, we investigate five organizations that strategize open science for global vaccine access. After analyzing activities and practices of vaccine research and development within the cases, we conducted an across-case comparison and identified overarching practices all organizations employ when strategizing open science on the input side of knowledge usage and creation. They recycle existing and available knowledge input, mimic vaccine technologies, and sidestep regulatory approval processes. We unpack these three practices of strategizing open science and outline their different facets and recursivenesses. We discuss how these practices of strategizing open science on the input side of knowledge usage and creation shape knowledge sharing as the output side.