* The closure of the FAS science challenge programme followed the Sunday Independent's exposé that it had been costing at least €1.2m a year.
Spanish scientists this week wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to protest the closure of the ministry of science and the "lamentable and shameful spectacle" of leading scientists being fired from research institutions because of budget cuts.
It's a good example of how some of science's closures may facilitate forms of openness.
The current trend of closure in physical science departments across the UK is in danger of leaving science deserts in regions around the UK, removing the opportunity for regional economic regeneration and removing the opportunity for young people in the region to access education in this vital discipline.
Such a view obscures ways in which an idea of open might be strategically applied to particular ends, and largely ignores the ways in which closure is a very everyday part of science, often very positively.
Rather than obsessing about openness then, we could instead focus our attention on how closure is a quite normal part of science, and consider points where science is closed in detail and on their own terms, so we might decide whether we're happy with them or not.
They quietly express hope that the agenda is a move away from the government's previous hard stance on science, including the failure to appoint a dedicated science minister, closure of the independent Climate Commission, and an AU$420 million cut to the nation's lead research agencies, among them the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIROO).
We may not agree with this, Indeed the openness of science may challenge norms of closure elsewhere (I think the web is a nice example of this).
Too much closure may contribute to isolation from the larger world of science.
And yet, despite the factual nature of science offering us some measure of consolation and closure in the face of our own demise, science fails to answer the relentless and yawning questions that haunt us after living things fade away--especially the tragic and criminal demise of mass murder and genocide that gnaw on human intelligence and empathy for generations after.
