Small Encyclopedia of Open Science

Open Science infrastructure plays a fundamental role in research. Large ecosystems of interconnected scholarly infrastructures have emerged in Europe, South and North America since 2000, through the development of new open science projects and the conversion of legacy infrastructures to open science principles. In 2021 the Unesco described Open Infrastructures…

Not opening scientific data is costly. It has been estimated that a significant share of scientific knowledge disappears every year. In a 2014 study less than half of biological datasets from the 1990s have been recovered and when possible the recovery has necessitated significant time and efforts. In comparison, 98%…

Scientific languages are vehicular languages used by one or several scientitific communities for international communication. According to Michael Gordin, they are “either specific forms of a given language that are used in conducting science, or they are the set of distinct languages in which science is done”.

Until the 19th…

Contrary to common expectations, 65-90% of the audience of open science platforms comes from non-academics. New research has shown that the open science movement has largely expanded the social, economic and cultural scope of scientific research. Regular users include students, non-academic professionals or private citizens.

Private and public structures extensively…

An Open Science Monitor or Open Access Monitor is a scientific infrastructure that aimed to assess the spread of open practices in a scientific contexts.

Open Science monitors have generally been built at the scale of a specific country or a specific institutions. They require an accurate assessment of the…

Bibliometrics is deeply transformed by open science. The unprecedented availability of bibliographic metadata, full text search and additional use metrics creates new opportunities for quantitative studies of scientific corpus. It also challenges the historical focus of bibliometrics on citation data from a few selected journals. New approaches aim to expand…

A 2016 survey by Nature showed that 70% of researchers have failed to reproduce an experiment by someone else. Half of the respondents have even failed to reproduce their own experiment. This is not a new phenomenon. In 1966, it was estimated that 73% of publications in psychology delivered invalid…

Open science has significantly reduced the costs of scholarly publication. A 2021 study estimates the expenses of a commercial open access publisher at 55% of the price of a standard subscription article: this proportion is significantly lower for non-commercial open access publication which can be as low as 10% of…

Contrary to a widespread belief that open access publications are paid by their authors, a significant amount of scientific articles are published with no fees to both readers and authors (or “Diamond” model). In 2021, it is estimated that between 17,000 and 29,000 scientific journals rely on a Diamond model.…

Between 2-4% of researchers admit to have falsified or fabricated their data. The prevalence of such unethical behavior can be as high as 10% in some disciplines or countries. Data falsification is an extreme form of questionable research practices that are both less problematic and much more widespread: surveys on…