How Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Influence Openness and Collaboration in Science?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly contributing to scientific breakthroughs in many fields. It is also clear that openness and cross-disciplinary collaboration are becoming key features of the process of modern science. Yet, we know little about the intersection of these two developments - whether and how AI may shape openness and collaboration in research. We, a group of scholars in the fields of science and innovation studies, engaged in an experiment as part of the 2022 OIS Research Conference: we collaboratively developed research ideas for a grant proposal, first without and then with the help of an AI tool. The results from the experiment indicate that AI is potentially useful for identifying and sharing relevant knowledge and for collaborating with knowledge actors outside the boundaries of scientists' own scientific fields, but it is not (yet) able to fully leverage this potential. At the same time, using AI tools may change the nature of scientific collaborations in subtle ways and lead to behavioral and cognitive challenges for scientists. The experiment raises new research questions regarding how collaborations between human actors and AI can be organized in a productive way.