The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review

Abstract

Open Science seeks to make research processes and outputs more accessible, transparent, and inclusive, ensuring that scientific findings can be freely shared, scrutinised, and built-upon by researchers and others. To date, there has been no systematic synthesis of the extent to which Open Science reaches these aims. We use the PRISMA scoping review methodology to partially address this gap, scoping evidence on the academic (but not societal or economic) impacts of OS. We identify 489 studies related to all aspects of OS, including Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data (OFD), Open Code/Software, Open Evaluation, and Citizen Science (CS). Analysing and synthesising findings, we show that the majority of studies investigated effects of OA, CS, and OFD. Key areas of impact studied are citations, quality, efficiency, equity, reuse, ethics, and reproducibility, with most studies reporting positive or at least mixed impacts. However, we also identified significant unintended negative impacts, especially those regarding equity, diversity and inclusion. Overall, the main barrier to academic impact of OS is lack of skills, resources, and infrastructure to effectively reuse and build on existing research. Building on this synthesis we identify gaps within this literature and draw implications for future research and policy.