Open science is a priority for many funders, publishers, and institutions—but without reliable and consistent industry data, setting targets and measuring progress can feel arbitrary.
DataSeer’s Open Science Metrics tool offers top-level statistics on a range of open science practices across thousands of articles—for example all articles from a certain publisher, or all articles affiliated with a particular funder or institution.
With Open Science Metrics, you can investigate adoption rates for practices including: Open Access licensing, data and code sharing, preprint posting, protocol sharing and reuse, personal identifiers, repositories used, and more. Dig deeper with breakdowns by journal, publisher, funder, county, or institution, or delve into the raw data. Open Science metrics offer the business intelligence you need to spot trends, and develop strategies, and drive open science forward.
Here are five ways organizations are using Open Science Metrics to better understand researcher needs and advance open science:
1. Discover opportunities for growth and make data-driven business decisions
It’s hard to increase adoption unless you first understand where growth opportunities lie. And it’s impossible to quantify progress if you don’t know where you started. By enabling understanding of openness across a portfolio, Open Science Metrics establish a benchmark for current practice and inform strategies to support open research in the future.
That’s the thinking behind IOP’s partnership with DataSeer, part of a larger effort by the publisher to accelerate scientific discovery and promote a culture of transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. In a similar spirit, UKRI has analyzed Open Science Metrics data by county to better understand how UK-based researchers’ open science behaviors compare.
2. Establish institutional and departmental baselines—and prepare to meet new funder mandates
In the U.S. the Nelson Memo officially goes into effect at the end of 2025. (Indeed, many Federal granting agencies are already rolling out changes.) With just 18 months left to prepare, Open Science Metrics offer the perfect jumping off point for institutions to determine where they stand vis-a-vis new requirements such as public availability and public data. Once you know the baseline for Open Access and data sharing among researchers at your institution, you can target information and support where it’s needed most, and ensure that your faculty are Nelson-Memo-ready when the time comes. Publishers can help support those aims by publishing data policy compliance reports alongside articles, providing researchers with evidence they can use to demonstrate that they’ve met funder mandates.
3. Check policy compliance rates and measure progress toward goals
Progressive open science policies are great—but how do you know if they are being met? A data availability statement may exist for every paper—but is it accurate? Are the links still valid? Is there more data described in the article than appears in the data files? For many publishers and funders, manually checking compliance details with that level of granularity is unfeasibly staff intensive.
Open Science Metrics is the first step in verifying what impact your open science policies have on researcher practice. For example when PLOS Computational Biology introduced a new code sharing policy, Open Science Metrics was able to demonstrate a change from 53% code sharing in 2019 to 96% in 2023, proving that the intervention had the effect editors were looking for.
4. Determine if your your preprint server and data repository deals are paying off
Many publishers maintain their own preprint servers and data repositories, or have paid partnership agreements with larger servers and repositories. But it isn’t always clear whether or how often researchers are taking advantage of the recommended options—and outlet-specific reporting is blind to usage that may be taking place elsewhere.
With Open Science Metrics, you’ll see overall usage rates at a glance, as well as breakouts by server or repository. That way, you can effectively measure ROI, ensure that you’re partnering with the most widely-used providers, and identify any breakdowns in workflow or researcher-facing communications.
5. Find out if openness is a differentiator at your organization—and use it to enhance your reputation
If openness is a part of your organization’s mission or values, you’re probably looking to demonstrate a commitment to open science that sets you apart from the competition. So how do you know if your organization is a leader in open science? By the numbers, of course.
With Open Science Metrics, you define the corpus you want to investigate—including a comparator dataset that will enable you to see how you stack up against peers, and to incorporate that message into your brand identity and marketing materials.
Of course, open science is about more than just access—it’s about transparency, research integrity and accelerating progress. For that reason, highlighting your open science credentials is an effective way to build a reputation for reliability, quality, and commitment to community.
What could you do with Open Science Metrics? Contact us at info@dataseer.ai to discuss options.
