Purpose-Vision-Mision

Why we exist

Liberate Science's purpose is to fulfill Article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights in its fullest sense:

  1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
  2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which [they are] the author.

We exist to apply this right and expand what it means. We exist to be creative and courageous in pursuing this goal, inspiring action.

We exist as an independent organization to not compromise these rights any step of the way. We exist to be generous and pay forward our excesses, enabling others to work towards this purpose from their own unique perspectives.

Where we want to go

Our vision is for anyone to contribute to our collective understanding, shaping our world for our collective benefit. This requires having accessible spaces to nurture potential contributions and having the tools to realize them. We see those contributions come in many different forms and from many different ways of knowing.

We want encounters with different ways of knowing to be commonplace. We have facts that help us navigate our shared reality – yet there is no final, singular, objective Knowledge™. We want to surface, advance, and bridge different ways of knowing, making our understanding stronger and more dynamic.

We envision an expansion of who is considered a researcher. If your process is one of gathering, documenting, and sharing information, you are doing research – doing research makes you a researcher. The resulting knowledge is as rigorous as that process – no matter your standing.

We envision many research commons, providing an abundance of opportunity to shape how we understand and make the reality we share.

How we will get there

We build and foster one piece of a self-sustaining research commons.

We build a digital research commons to conduct research among equals (that is, ResearchEquals). This commons promotes all research labor, focuses on how knowledge is constructed, and makes power structures in our knowledge visible. It is an open-source infrastructure, freely available to gather, document, and share information on by anyone.

We foster this digital research commons by bringing it to research conducting organizations. They in turn, bring it to their researchers. In doing so, they reconstruct their own knowledge work and amplify our mission. Our services evolve around enabling research from a process focus within these organizations. These services further the development of ResearchEquals and finance our mission. Research conducting organizations also get to share their respective research contexts in the development process, influencing what ResearchEquals becomes. This makes it more applicable to a wider range of research conducting organizations.

In the future, we will support and foster other initiatives that work towards our shared purpose: Furthering Article 27 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Supporting and fostering other initiatives can happen through in-kind resources or providing financial resources. To do this effectively, we first need to secure finances for our own mission and map the skills we can provide. Further details, milestones, and goals will have to be filled out once we secure the foundations of our business. This kind of work will advance our understanding of where power dynamics exist, find levers to distribute that power, and take action.