Who writes the rules of science?

Astronomers who gathered in Baltimore in 1992 thought they were drafting a charter that would change their field. Three decades later, one of its authors calls it ‘tame’. Joris Vandendriessche and Anna Cabanel use this and other moments – from religious oaths to today’s TRUST Code – to show how written rules and unwritten customs continue to shape who belongs in science. 

In 1992, nearly 200 astronomers, the vast majority of them women, met at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to discuss the status of women in their field. They presented evidence of academic inequalities and shared experiences of discrimination and misconduct.  

The meeting produced The Baltimore Charter for Women in Astronomy, a call for action signed by all participants. The Charter recommended practical measures to improve gender equality, including transparent recruitment criteria, the inclusion of women on selection committees, strong action against sexual harassment, the adoption of gender-neutral language and images in publications and official correspondence.  

Yet the Charter also highlighted the less tangible barriers that hindered women’s full participation in astronomy. It referred to both ‘formal and informal mechanisms that are effectively discriminatory, and, in another passage, to the chilly climate that discourages and distresses women, and alienates them from the field.” 

Those passages capture a broader change that has shaped science over the past century: the growing tendency to turn previously implicit norms and understanding into explicit (written) rules and guidelines.  

When ethics moved onto paper 

Scientists have always worked within systems of rules and shared expectations. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, scholars interacted according to well-established ideas of trust, honour and civility that were rooted in a culture of ‘gentleman’ science. These norms guided behaviour but were rarely articulated in writing. They were learned through participation rather than formal instruction.  

Those formal codes that did exist often served other purposes. At many religious universities, for example, newly appointed professors swore a faith-based oath of allegiance (e.g. to Catholicism). Such oaths reflected the religious divisions of European society, but they did not regulate scientific practice itself.  During the twentieth century, however, the need for written codes grew rapidly.  

One reason was a general spread of ethical awareness across the sciences. A series of medical scandals and abuses prompted the codification of standards, especially after the Nuremberg Code of 1947, on the treatment of human subjects and the integrity of scientific practice. The shock of repeated cases of misconduct (ranging from medical studies to data fabrication in other fields) exposed a gap between ideals and practice, making further codification urgent and necessary.   

A second reason was the need to organise international scientific collaboration due to acute geopolitical tensions and conflicts, from the World Wars through the Cold War and decolonisation. In this process, international institutions such as the International Research Council and UNESCO sought to translate shared ideals, such as the universality of science and non-discrimination, into practical standards to govern scholarly participation and exchange. This required advocating for common standards while simultaneously acknowledging profound differences between scientists in local customs and institutional capacities.  

Making the invisible visible 

Codes of conduct proved highly useful, adaptable instruments for coping with these new ethical, political and social challenges for scientific practice. They acted as ‘elastic’ documents that could help regulate increasingly diverse and transnational scholarly communities.  

The Baltimore Charter reflected growing awareness in the early 1990s that scientific careers were shaped not only by formal procedures but also by everyday practices and assumptions.  Looking back in 2022, Meg Urry, one of its main authors, notes that what had felt ‘powerful and radical’ in 1992 now seemed  ‘tame’. Her observation illustrates how codes evolve alongside the communities they seek to guide.  

The discussions in Baltimore also did something else. By discussing issues that had often remained implicit, such as unequal expectations about childcare, they made those assumptions visible. Making hidden norms explicit was in itself a crucial step towards changing them. The TRUST Code belongs to this longer tradition.  Like earlier efforts to counter discrimination in science and establish fair and honest research ethics, it seeks to establish shared principles for responsible research. 

 In 1946, the International Research Council formulated in its statutes the need to oppose ‘any discrimination on the basis of such factors as ethnic origin, religion, citizenship, language, political stance, gender, sex or age.’ Its efforts, in collaboration with UNESCO, to build capacity to promote the universality of science and the free circulation of scientists, resonate with many aspects of the TRUST Code. 

At the same time, the TRUST Code reflects contemporary concerns through its focus on cultural sensitivity, the importance of local languages, and respect for privacy and equitable international collaboration. 

The quiet power of unwritten rules 

Yet written codes never tell the whole story. 

Implicit codes continue to govern scientific practice and various aspects of scholars’ behaviour. Such unwritten codes regulate how to write an article (in terms of style, composition, and tone), how to ask a question ‘in the right way’ at a conference, or how to dress in specific, formal academic settings. These practices often belong to the realm of tacit knowledge.  This term refers to a type of knowledge or skill that one can perform but hardly articulate or express (such as riding a bicycle). As scholars become socialised in a scientific field, they learn how to behave through practice and experience. Yet putting this into writing seems hard, if not impossible, revealing the limits of formal written codes of conduct. 

Such implicit codes of conduct help create communities of insiders who understand and perform them, while making it hard for others to participate fully. This can influence recognition in science, such as the awarding of prizes and grants.  

Research has shown that jury members are often more likely to award scholars who resemble themselves - the so-called ‘like-me effect’. As a result, researchers who are less familiar with these unwritten rules have a competitive disadvantage. Among the latter are often women scientists and scientists from different minority backgrounds, revealing how the categories of gender and ethnicity are tied up with these deeper lying and unspoken codes that regulate scholarly life.   

An ongoing process 

How effective are formal codes, like the TRUST Code, then in regulating science? Can they also alter or influence less tangible aspects of scientific practice, such as the chilly climate that women astronomers identified and sought to modify in Baltimore in 1992?  

History suggests they cannot regulate every aspect of scientific life. Some implicit dynamics within scholarly relations will remain beyond their reach. But over the course of the twentieth century, formal codes did prove to be a strong catalyst for change. By making expectations explicit, they encourage scientific communities to reflect on practices that might otherwise remain unquestioned.  

The TRUST Code is the latest chapter in that long history. Like the Baltimore Charter before it, it reminds us that the rules of science are never fixed. They continue to evolve alongside science itself – and so does our understanding of who belongs within it.   

Joris Vandendriessche is a historian of science and leads the ERC Starting Grant project GLOBAL ACADEMIES at the KU Leuven. 

Anna Cabanel is a postdoctoral researcher on the same project, specialising in the history of science and academic cultures.