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The Science Externalities Declaration

AI industrializes scientific production. Accountability must no longer rely on ethics checklists alone. It must be legally executable.

Preamble

Scientific progress creates extraordinary public value. It can also create systematic externalities: diffuse harm, opaque attribution, delayed injury, and institutional evasion of responsibility.

The acceleration of AI-enabled research has changed scale, speed, and reversibility. Governance models built on voluntary statements and fragmented oversight cannot reliably prevent foreseeable harm.

We therefore affirm: the object of legal formalization is not the daily routine of researchers. The object is the rights-and-duties architecture of scientific outputs once they enter society.

Five Foundational Commitments

  1. Attribution before exposure. Deployments with material externality risk require explicit ownership and named duty-holders.
  2. Evidence before immunity. Claims of due diligence must be auditable; undocumented diligence is not diligence.
  3. Correction before escalation. Institutions must maintain executable pathways for withdrawal, correction, notification, and remedy.
  4. Burden reduction by design. New compliance duties are legitimate only if they reduce duplicate reporting and net administrative load.
  5. Portability across systems. Responsibility records must be reusable across journals, funders, institutions, and jurisdictions.

Scope

This declaration applies to high-impact scientific outputs, including AI models, model-derived artifacts, synthetic datasets, automated discovery pipelines, and decision-support systems with plausible social externalities.

Science and Scopus Externalities Watch

We continuously search and report publications on scientific and technological externalities, with emphasis on AI externalities, governance, accountability, and remedy design.

Science (AAAS)

Track peer-reviewed and policy-facing discussions in Science.

Search Science

Suggested query: "scientific externalities" OR "AI externalities" OR "technological externalities"

Scopus

Monitor large-scale cross-disciplinary literature and citation trends.

Open Scopus Search

Suggested query: TITLE-ABS-KEY("scientific externalities" OR "AI externalities" OR "technology externalities")

Signatory Statement

By signing, we support legally enforceable accountability for scientific externalities, with due process protections for researchers and effective remedies for affected publics.

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