On a cross-disciplinary note, this contribution attempts to pierce the veil of Maya surrounding sustainability as a mainstream legal, economic and policy notion and contextualises into the realm of scientific governance and regulation. At the outset, it is argued that, instead of relying on modern and contemporary understandings of sustainability – fixed on the two opposing poles of the anthropocentric and ecological views –, we could learn from cosmologies drawn from ancient civilizations. In this way, we can seek harmony between the Human and the Nature, while being aware of complexity of ‘reality’, its contradictions and irrationalities. Today’s scientific governance and regulation are epitomized by the Open Science policy (OS) that takes inspiration from recent philosophical interpretations of science. What are OS practices? Where do they originate from? This article briefly traces a storyline of OS genealogy from free access in the shadow libraries through the open access movement. In conclusion, it purports to answer the following questions: can the OS policy attain sustainability? How? What are the merits and limits of the current global approach?