Chan, Hall, Piron, Tandon and Williams argue that Open Science must exceed the narrow equation of openness with access to publications and data, becoming instead a decolonial practice conducted for and with communities. Prepared in the context of UNESCO’s consultations and sharpened by the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper identifies multiple forms of openness: access to literature and datasets, public participation in scientific debate, partnerships with civil society, citizen science, and recognition of Indigenous and Global South knowledge systems. Its core critique is that conventional open access may reproduce inequality when it privileges pay-to-publish models, English-language prestige, impact-factor hierarchies and Eurocentric epistemologies. The case synthesis emerges through the pandemic discussion on pages 2–3, where accelerated publishing, open data, community laboratories, citizen initiatives and marginalised medical traditions reveal both the promise and limits of openness. The authors’ deeper intervention lies in cognitive justice: science must become pluriversal, acknowledging that Indigenous knowledge, community expertise and non-Anglophone scholarship are not supplements to “real” science but indispensable epistemic partners. Their thirteen policy considerations demand support for community-governed infrastructures, bibliodiversity, translation, diverse editorial boards, partnership research, Indigenous knowledge teaching and the abolition of Global North ranking logics. The conclusion is unequivocal: Open Science becomes ethically meaningful only when it redistributes authority, repairs epistemic erasure and builds a plurilingual commons of shared, socially grounded knowledge.
