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What is the impact of open science practice?

PLOS Open Science Open Science Indicators

In a new study now available as a preprint on arXiv, we explore the link between open science practices and citations for all publications with French authors over a 3-year period. The results of our analysis offer promising results with national importance: open science practices such as sharing data, code and preprints are linked to increased citations.

The study is co-authored by our own Director of Open Research Solutions, Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Open Research Manager, Lauren Cadwallader and Professor Giovanni Colavizza of the University of Copenhagen. 

In our work to advance open science, we’re committed to driving meaningful change by ensuring the solutions we design and promote are useful to the communities we serve. Open Science Indicators are one tool we’ve developed to help us to measure trends and progress in open science behaviors, but we also take on deeper investigations to understand the needs, motivations, and impact of open science practices. 

France has a progressive national policy on open science and has been a leader in aspects of monitoring that policy. This made for a promising cohort to measure the effects of open science practices

The following announcement was published by the The French Committee for Open Science highlighting the importance of these findings to stakeholders in the region. Read the original post here.

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For the first time on a scale of a country, France, a study demonstrates that Open Science could increase the chances for researchers to be cited

The authors chose to study France, a leading country in monitoring Open Science, and to use data from the French Open Science Monitor, that covers the entire country since 2018.

Public policies promoting open science aim to develop the circulation of knowledge across all levels of society. They seek to strengthen the international influence of academic research while promoting transparency, cumulative growth and reproducibility in research. By sharing research methods, materials and results, these policies encourage the wider dissemination of knowledge beyond the academic world to society, communities and the economic sector. These policies are implemented at the global (UNESCO), continental (European Union) and national (France) levels.

Measuring the impact of these open science policies is a major challenge in assessing the consequences of public policies and adapting future initiatives. Several studies have already established the impact in terms of citations for open science practices, although these studies often remain domain-specific.

For the first time, an international research team has conducted a comprehensive study covering an entire country and all disciplines. The authors, Giovanni Colavizza (Denmark), Lauren Cadwallader (United States) and Iain Hrynaszkiewicz (United States), chose to study France, a leading country in monitoring Open Science, and to use data from the French Open Science Monitor, that covers the entire country since 2018.

The study covers a considerable corpus of over 500,000 scientific articles. It reveals that each open science practice seems to be associated with an increase of the number of citations of the articles concerned. The results show that:

  • An article published in open access is linked to 8.6% increase in citations compared to an article that is not open access.
  • An article sharing source code is linked to 13.5% increase in citations.
  • An article sharing data is linked to 14.3% increase in citations.
  • An article published as a preprint is linked to 19% increase in citations.

These results vary considerably across disciplines and represent the average of diverse specific situations. For example, in medical research, data sharing is associated with a 34.9% increase in citations. In basic biology, publishing a preprint is associated with a 25.3% increase in citations. In the social sciences, sharing code related to a publication is associated with a 38% increase in citations.

This study does not close the book on open science research. The impact of open science needs to be assessed in many other fields, particularly beyond the academic world. However, it is a crucial first step and offers promising results regarding the academic impact of open science practices.

Find out more:

•         The study published as a preprint

•         The French Open Science Monitor

•         National open science policy in France

•         Ouvrirlascience.fr

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