Mertonian norms were offered by Merton to make sense of scientists and engineers in the 1950s-60s… so to suggest that they are re-emerging is, yes, to suggest that they are re-emerging in science and engineering generally, but related to the success of (and debates about) open source and free software. So no… they are not inherent to the recursive public (i.e. to Free Software), since Free Software is itself indebted to these norms and ideals (if you believe they actually exist, and many Free Software geeks do). But yes, they are part of the same Actor-Network. I could have told the story from the perspective of these norms and the reasons scientists, engineers, hackers and now geeks generally give for following them.

To say that they have “re-emerged” is to point to the fact that many scientists and engineers have realized that they may not actually ever have existed in any strong sense. This is what most of the SSK scholarship in the 1970s-1980s pointed out, that the norms simply weren’t that important to what people do in science. So today there are people in science (e.g. Harold Varmus) who are trying to revive the Mertonian norms as priniciples for the production of knowledge today, and they do so by adopting practices and tools that were forged in Free Software (licenses and ideas of open infrastructure/standards, principally).