Measuring Open Science

"To deliver the benefits of open science, increasing adoption of open science practices is a prerequisite. These practices include research data, protocol and code sharing, preprint posting, and open access publishing. There are numerous initiatives across the research ecosystem – policies, training, tools, incentives – from funders, researchers, institutions, and publishers alike that should lead to increased adoption of open science practices. Examples of initiatives include the researcher-led International Reproducibility Networks to promote open research practices, Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s stringent open science requirements, and eLife’s shift towards a preprint-first publishing model. But we lack comprehensive and reliable evidence on how widely open science practices are being adopted by researchers and how these practices vary between disciplines and geographies (communities). Other initiatives have emerged that tackle this problem of measuring progress towards open science. These include the work of meta-researchers, such as BIH QUEST’s Charite Metrics Dashboard, and tools such as DataSeer and SciScore. The publisher PLOS has also introduced ‘Open Science Indicators’, (OSI) to track adoption of open science practices over time in the scholarly literature. With all this activity that shares a common goal of increasing adoption of open science there is a need for conversations about how we define and measure different open science practices, for what purposes and for which audiences and consider field-specific differences. This virtual symposium will bring together researcher, funder, institutions and publisher representatives to present developments in this area and explore commonalities and differences in approaches, which could promote future collaboration."