In 2024, DataSeer embarked upon a pilot project with Silverchair. Together, we embedded Open Science Metrics data into Silverchair’s Sensus Impact funder dashboards to create data-rich micro-sites for five select funders.
DataSeer’s Open Science Metrics quantify research integrity and open science behaviors across thousands of articles at a time, delivering accurate and meaningful business intelligence that can be used in benchmarking, policy development, and measuring change over time. Sensus Impact brings together multiple data sources, including views, downloads, and citations, as well as attention data from Altmetric to create a complete picture of each funders’ impact and reach. The addition of Open Science Metrics to the Sensus Impact platform illuminates open science adoption among key funders’ grantees, adding a new facet of impact, and making it easy to identify trends, measure policy compliance, and see the influence of policy changes.
Six months after the initial pilot, we’re excited to add a sixth funder to the cohort: United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI). We analyzed 518 articles funded by UKRI between 2019 and 2024. What we found may surprise you.
How are UKRI-funded researchers embracing openness?
UKRI is a member of cOAlition S. As such, the organization supports Open Access (OA) publishing and encourages open data, code sharing, preprints, and other transparent research practices geared toward improving reproducibility and maximizing the impact of every grant dollar.
Currently grantees are expected to demonstrate how they will manage and share data as part of their application process: “UKRI expects you to make your research data openly available with as few restrictions as possible in a timely and responsible manner.” That’s about to change. In April the organization invited feedback on the draft of a new policy for the sharing of research data, software and code. The feedback window ends July 9 2025.
The impending policy revision makes this an especially opportune moment to analyze the published output of UKRI grantees using Open Science Metrics, giving everyone the chance to see how effective the current policy is, and set success metrics for the new policy as it goes into effect.
A review of the numbers reveals relatively high data sharing rates of 40%, roughly in the middle of the two cohorts, with NSF and Gates on the high end, and NCI, NASA and CIHR below. Publicly available data has been shown to increase understanding, reproducibility, and attention including citation rate — which is often interpreted as a proxy for both trust and reuse.
When it comes to code, UKRI had a code-generation rate slightly below the average (47%), and a code sharing rate slightly above the average (19%). Like data, open code is linked to reproducibility, reuse, and increased attention.
What does open science adoption really measure?
Open science is much more than simple transparency. It’s a suite of tools for reshaping scholarly communications in ways that are faster, more reliable, and much more far-reaching. It’s about advancing scientific research in meaningful, impactful ways. For that reason, open science adoption has become a priority for funders like UKRI, anxious to see their grant dollars put to good use. And measuring openness is a key part of telling the story of funders’ impact on research and the world. Open Science Metrics makes that possible.
