Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

ESTS Incoming Editorial – A New Editorial Collective for ESTS

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We write to introduce ourselves as the new Editorial Collective for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. This editorial describes how we are taking up the journal's mission of openness, building on the work of ESTS’s prior leadership. We also summarize several changes that we are making to the journal's procedures, including publishing articles individually rather than waiting to gather them into full issues and soliciting contributions under a single, flexible submission category.

How Moderation Makes Science: Precautionary Valuation and Boundary-Making in the Early Circulation of Research

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:44:28 +0000

As preprint servers proliferate across scientific fields, moderation has emerged as a lightly structured form of gatekeeping that precedes—or bypasses—peer review. This article examines moderation as a site of precautionary valuation and boundary-making in the early circulation of research. Drawing on interviews with 14 individuals responsible for screening and oversight across 13 preprint servers, we analyze both the evaluative logics that organize moderation and the ways moderators themselves understand and frame their work. We find that credibility is enacted through precaution-driven threshold judgments—centering harm, trust, and community expectations—which determine whether a submission can responsibly circulate as scholarship. While moderators often reject the label of “gatekeeper,” our findings show that their work performs a subtle but consequential filtering that shapes what and who enters the scholarly record—even as servers work to distance these decisions from the domain of peer review. By tracing how precautionary judgments and boundary-making structure decisions about what enters circulation at the preprint stage, we contribute to STS debates on valuation, peer review, and the governance of scholarly communication in open science.

Commitment Issues in Science & Technology Studies: On the Necessity of Compromising One’s Principles

Bård Torvetjønn Haugland, Alexander Myklebust — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:18:01 +0000

There have been longstanding discussions regarding the place of normative commitments in Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship. Analysing STS critiques of Innovation Studies and accounts of the institutionalisation of RRI in the European Union, the article highlights how co-productionist scholarship often commits to second-order (meta-governance) principles rather than first-order (substantial) principles. Relating this tendency to the debate surrounding the third wave of science studies and Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim’s liberal dilemma, the article emphasises the importance of distinguishing formal and substantial commitments and recognising that the reification of norms (e.g., in governance and prescriptive frameworks) requires translating those norms into substantial principles. This also requires delimiting those principles. The article provides three suggestions on how STS scholars may relate to normative commitments.