Open Sesame! What do researchers think of Open Science?

Author: Gustav Bohlin – Public & Science (VA), Sweden

Co-authors:

• Martin Bergman – Public & Science (VA), Sweden

Open science is about making research more accessible and transparent to both researchers and society in general. It encompasses several potentially transforming aspects such as open access to research publications, open data, open peer review and open source. Other often associated practices seek to involve societal stakeholders through science communication, public engagement or citizen science. For the researcher, involving citizens and other actors at various stages of the research process makes communication more important and complex than before. So far, the transition towards open science has largely been driven from a policy-maker perspective, most notably by the European Commission. However, less is known about the researchers’ own perspective on a transformation that will bring several practical changes to their daily work.

This paper will present results from interviews (n=10) and a survey (n=3,699) conducted in 2019 with researchers at Swedish universities about their understanding/awareness of open science as well as their concerns and hopes. The results show that nearly two-thirds of the researchers have heard of the term. The majority believes that the benefits of open science outweigh the disadvantages, but there is disagreement as to whether the system will make their work easier or more difficult. Several differences in attitudes are found across scientific disciplines and career stage of the researcher. Other topics to be presented include researchers’ awareness of and attitudes toward alternative methods of measuring research impact (altmetrics) and citizen science.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Insight talk
Theme: Transformation