Perspectives on Open Science and Scholarly Publishing: a Survey Study Focusing on Early Career Researchers in Europe

Abstract

Background: The value of Open Science (OS) for the academic community and society has been becoming more evident recently, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, significant challenges regarding its implementation arise that are likely to affect researchers, especially those in early career stages. Hence, monitoring early-career researchers’ views, knowledge, and skills on OS and related policies, is crucial for its advancement. The main aim of this exploratory study was to gain new perspectives regarding the awareness of and attitudes towards OS and related practices having in consideration geographical, economic and research career variables. Methods: The survey was conducted during May-August 2020 as part of a collaboration between Eurodoc and the Open Research Europe project. The data from the survey were analyzed by European region, Gross domestic product, Gross domestic expenditure on research and development as a percentage of gross domestic product, field of study, and career stage. Results: The awareness and positive attitude regarding OS, specifically among early-career researchers, is high in Europe. However, there are significant career stage group differences in views and knowledge about OS. Generally, awareness and positive attitude tend to increase with increasing career seniority. Regarding European regions, we spotted three main groups sharing similar awareness levels and attitudes: researchers in Western Europe - the most informed group towards OS; researchers in northern, central, and southern Europe - a moderately informed group with some minor differences; and researchers in eastern Europe - the least informed group, whose opinions deviate the most. Conclusions: We found that there is an “evolution of needs and focus” regarding scientific publishing: researchers in most European regions are in different stages of transition from the competitive to collaborative levels, while researchers in eastern Europe are largely beginning their transition to the competitive level.

The potential of citizen science to transform science: Lessons for a sustainable future

“…Open research, encompassing multiple practices including open data, open access publishing and open reproducible research (Fecher & Friesike, 2013), has long been a priority of science policy, facilitated by the development of platforms through which scientific findings can be shared, such as the Open Science Framework, and the European Open Science Cloud, which is in its second stage of development. Yet there are still barriers to researchers engaging in Open Science, including a lack of sufficient training in OS tools, concerns over scientific quality and increased workload (Berezko et al., 2021; Zečević et al., 2021).…”

“…Open research, encompassing multiple practices including open data, open access publishing and open reproducible research (Fecher & Friesike, 2013), has long been a priority of science policy, facilitated by the development of platforms through which scientific findings can be shared, such as the Open Science Framework, and the European Open Science Cloud, which is in its second stage of development. Yet there are still barriers to researchers engaging in Open Science, including a lack of sufficient training in OS tools,concerns over scientific quality and increased workload(Berezko et al, 2021;Zečević et al, 2021).Citizen science projects have been shown to have high transformative potential in making science more open(Passani, Janssen, & Forino, 2021). In 2016, a set of guiding principles were instantiated with the aim to establish a standard for scientific data, ensuring that it is FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable(Wilkinson et al, 2016).…”

Ethical Publishing: How Do We Get There?

“…Such expanding connections between actors can strengthen the leverage we all have to propose and implement changes in research assessment, towards a social tipping point. For example, this can be done by engaging with our student and early career researcher representatives, encouraging them to connect to organizations advocating for change on national and supranational scales (Berezko et al 2021;Hnatkova, DiFranco, and Srinivas 2020). We can also formalize our support for existing collective actions that pledge for  OPEN ACCESS -PTPBIO.ORG more ethical publishing: e.g., signing DORA, the Jussieu call (Bauin et al 2017), or the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al 2015).…”

Perception of Open Science in the Scientific Community of the Republic of Moldova

“…Most of the analyzed studies based on surveys cover all fields of science, but there are also studies focused on specific areas: psychology (Abele-Brehm et al, 2019), agriculture (Williams et al, 2019) or social sciences (Christensen et al, 2020). The most researched elements of OS seem to be OA (e.g., Segado-Boj et al, 2018;Rodriguez, 2014;Stanton & Liew, 2012;Ostaszewski, 2014) and open data (e.g., Abdullahi & Noorhidawati, 2021;Ostaszewski, 2014), less open evaluation and nextgeneration/altimetry indicators (Segado-Boj et al, 2018), and most studies generally address OS (e.g., Pardo Martínez & Poveda, 2018;Ostaszewski, 2014;Berezko et al, 2021;Schöpfel et al, 2016).…”

“…Some studies have highlighted: 1) age and gender differences: women and young researchers would be more reluctant to open review (Segado-Boj et al, 2018); higher age leads to fewer publications on OA, younger age -more favourable towards OS, women have a lower awareness of OS, but are more favourable towards OS (Ostaszewski, 2014); favourability and awareness of OS is higher in researchers in the early stages of their careers (Berezko et al, 2021), but the attitude of these researchers is more categorical (positive or negative) (Abele-Brehm et al, 2019); 2) research sector differences: staff at research institutes know less about OS than those at universities (Ostaszewski, 2014); or 3) geographical regions differences: researchers in Western Europe would be the most informed about OS, and those from Eastern Europe -the least informed ones (they are also more engaged in competition than in collaboration in publishing the results) (Berezko et al, 2021).…”