Can science shape its own future?
Sir Peter Gluckman
President, International Science Council (ISC)
Director of Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures
Published on July 13th, 2026
The boundary conditions for public science in its relationships to politics, policy, business and civil society are rapidly changing. Science itself is changing. The issue for the science community is not only understanding and responding to the external pressures that are driving instability and change but considering with urgency the factors that lie within its own institutions and culture that need to be addressed if science is to thrive.
Science under change
Some changes are welcome: a growing diversity of actors within the global scientific community, more transdisciplinary research, a greater focus on societal impact. But geostrategic, political, and economic factors are threatening science’s capacity to contribute to global wellbeing. Technological developments are rapidly changing both the nature of science and the context in which it operates. The balance between public and private sector science is changing – but a large cultural divide remains between these two sectors.
Growing populism and a greater political focus on the short-term are affecting both public opinion and policy decisions. Greater nationalism is being exhibited, with a weakening commitment to a rules-based global order and this has impacted on international scientific cooperation with a consequent loss of focus on the issues of the global commons. As populism gains more traction, science is challenged as a source of authority. Trust in science has been politicized with distrust a badge of political identity. But if science is accepted or rejected in alignment with partisan positions, scientists risk being labelled as pushing political aims. The rise of the scientist as an activist may be inevitable and even desirable on existential issues. But publicly funded science must treat remaining above partisan politics as one of its most important and enduring assets.
The rapid emergence of science-based technologies being applied at a speed that societies find difficult to accommodate risks further tension at the science-society interface. There needs to be greater restraint in the rush to develop some technologies such as mirror biology until risks are explored and social license is achieved. The ethical considerations with such technologies extend well beyond considerations that many life-sciences researchers are familiar with. We need to learn better from the current issues being confronted in the explosion of applications of artificial intelligence (AI).
Technologies and in particular AI are radically changing how science is done, what can be done and who is doing it. It is possible that, in the future, advanced computation power may determine who can do what science and this may generate technological neocolonialism. These technologies will change how scientists need to be trained and how scientific excellence is defined and rewarded.
Publicly funded scientists must defend the need for open data against moves that may constrain it, driven by geopolitical or economic constraints. But beyond the underlying scientific desire for open data - which needs constant justification as global data sets are threatened - there are urgent issues of oversight, privacy, ethics, data sovereignty and social license. These extend well beyond traditional domains, such as clinical research, to domains that have not given such matters much attention. They require science to be in a more effective partnership with government, business and society on such matters.
Despite the expectation that science would be an essential underpinning to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), progress has been poor. Perhaps the organization of public science is not well constructed to produce actionable knowledge. More extensive use of mission-led and transdisciplinary approaches and engagement with civil society and policy-makers is needed and this likely requires organizational redesign given that the organizational culture of sciences remains largely fixed in a narrow response-driven mode, reinforced by incentives that drive siloed reductionist research.
In this changing context, science cannot be passive: it must help shape its own future if science is to be sustained as a public good.
Self-reflection and self-regulation
Modern science is built around self-regulation, but this is increasingly questioned. Should scientists alone determine funding priorities? Should peer review be extended to include the end-user? Scientists generally resist that broader engagement, but it risks science being accused of being insensitive to realities and need.
Much publicity has been given to the so-called reproducibility crisis. The causes are multiple: poor experimental design, underpowered studies, sloppy methodology, and inherent methodological and biological variability. Episodes of scientific fraud attract attention in the media, especially if poorly handled by the relevant institutions. All this provides fuel for sceptics. The science community must seek to eliminate incentives that undermine confidence in science. All scientists need training in research design and scientific ethics.
The scientific paper is the primary form of communication. The emergence of bibliometrics in the 1980s supercharged a more industrial mindset within the scientific community (‘publish or perish’) and in parallel fueled the highly profitable industry of scientific publication. It spurred the emergence of a vast number of predatory journals, paper mills and poor-quality papers which have contaminated the record of knowledge. Recent developments in AI have fueled a raft of questionable publishing practices and the volume of submissions has escalated enormously. Many vanity journals have emerged, each publishing a very small number of papers. Peer review, which is under extreme pressure, is the basis of self-regulating scientific validation.
While there are other issues in science publishing related to the business model, it is the culture and behaviors within the science community itself that drive these questionable behaviors and put science in peril. Lip service is paid to agreements such as DORA, but the ‘bibliometric disease’ continues to spread. Eradicating it is difficult – it requires academics, institutions, funders and reputable publishers to collaborate to eradicate this disease. Perhaps journals need to be certified by the science community in consultation with publishers to validate that their processes are robust. The science community and its institutions must give this issue the highest priority. If trust in the record of science is lost, then science itself will risk no longer being trusted.
Metrics drive much of the culture of academic science but bibliometrics are at best pseudo-objective and cannot address what is essentially subjective: research excellence and impact. As funders and governments seek validation of the value of their investments in research, there is a need to recognize that publication and impact are different things. Impact can take years to emerge and cannot be measured simply through appearance in a major journal. Truly impactful research does not only generate citations, it also generates actionable knowledge or measurable outcomes via innovation and interventions. The discussions underway towards new forms of research assessment are to be applauded, but science and its institutions need to be open to and embrace them. This will require the science community to engage with funders and institutions to form a collective view – something that has not yet been achieved – perhaps because science organizations themselves require more coherent organization.
Some scientists appear to have a sense of ‘encapsulated entitlement’ - undertaking research activities that might be seen largely to keep themselves employed rather than meeting an obligation to the public funds that are being expended. This may be unfair but is a consequence of our culture and failures in self-regulation. Research funding instruments which themselves are largely administered by scientists need to give more attention to justifications given for the research. Whether it is discovery or late-stage research, all scientists should be able to justify why it should be funded from the public purse.
Sustaining the public research enterprise will require addressing science communication, which is often self-serving, jargon ridden, patronizing, or manifestly hyperbolic. Too often the realities of uncertainty inherent to science and complexities in the pathway from discovery to application are hidden: dogmatic certainty is conveyed. There is a need for changes in how science is communicated, but precisely what this means and who should be the communicator requires greater consideration.
Science is not the only knowledge system that people or societies use. Many in science are yet to fully understand how to engage with other knowledge systems. The interaction between science and society should become core to scientific training. The very issues where science is most needed are those that generate societal conflicts and tensions. Science must accept society’s primary role in determining the uses of science. The issues of social license for many technologies will become a point of greater political debate and the science community must give it greater attention.
A call to action
Scientists and science institutions must not put their head in the sand and expect a return to the ‘good old days’. They must pre-emptively recognize the context, the stresses and opportunities ahead and adjust to these new realities. Only then will science play its central role in assisting the global public good, societal wellbeing and planetary health. Publicly funded researchers will need to be explicit in justifying what science is done and why, and why it should be funded by taxpayers.
Scientific leaders and hosting institutions must work constructively with policymakers, even in difficult economic times, to ensure that science supports public, societal, and collective interests. The argument for addressing the global commons will be based on each country being persuaded that it is in their national interest to do so. Advocacy alone will not be sufficient; well-developed arguments and adaptive institutions will be needed.
Patrons of science, be them governments or foundations, have a right to determine general priorities or areas of focus. But beyond that, self-regulation has served public science well over the past six decades. Basic science is critical for the future, and the scope of applied science extends from stewardship of renewable social and environmental resources to economically exploitable knowledge. The science community needs to recognize the State and public are stakeholders. On issues of quality, impact and priorities, science must engage appropriately with a broad group of stakeholders and appreciate the role of extended peer review.
Public science must take steps to justify and then guard its self-regulatory roles and must become more unified in doing so. It will need to continue to clean up its own act: eliminating untrustworthy behaviors, eliminating the deluge of poor science in poor journals, focusing on science communication in more effective ways, reconsidering peer review. The International Science Council - which is the umbrella organization representing the active science community and national academies - must focus on these issues, perhaps even creating formal oversight processes, and better advance the case for public science.
Most scientists have no formal training in ethics, the philosophy of science, on science-society interactions, on the science-policy interface. Such topics should be essential in the training of every natural, social or data scientist. We need to work with our communities, explain scientific methods, and remove mystery without patronizing simplification. The purist separation of public and private sector science is no longer tenable, and transparent rules of engagement need development.
Science and technology will determine the planet’s and every society’s future. The science community can and must do more to shape its own future - rather than seeking to return to some idealistic vision of the past - if science is to meet its fundamental mission of serving society well.
Disclaimer:
The author declares no conflicts of interest. He acknowledges his colleagues for comments on various drafts and in particular thanks Drs Matthias Kaiser, Salvatore Arico and Annalise Higgins.
The views expressed here are those of the author, not of the International Science Council.
Copyright: © 2026 [author(s)]. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in Frontiers Policy Labs is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
