Based on a review of published research on the societal impact of Open Science, Nicki Lisa Cole and colleagues find considerable evidence for the benefits of citizen science, but a much thinner evidence base for the impacts of other aspects of open science. Their findings suggest that there is a greater need to think about how these impacts are monitored, and that there is an opportunity to consider open science as an inclusive practice, rather than just a method of disclosing scientific results.

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Open science is a collection of practices that aim to open up the scientific process and its results for the benefit of science and society. In this way, open science is intended to increase the societal impact of science compared to its traditionally “closed” nature. Proponents believe that open science should both democratize the scientific process by encouraging societal involvement in it and by providing free, open access to published reports and datasets. Proponents also believe that open access materials better enable policymakers to develop evidence-based policies.

However, there is still a lack of conclusive evidence that Open Science achieves its goal of promoting societal impact. There are increasing efforts worldwide to Implementation of open science practices (often referred to as ‘uptake’), such as the European Commission’s Open Science Monitor, but there is no systematic way to monitor their societal impact.

To fill this gap, we set out to summarize and evaluate published evidence of societal impact of open science in general and its key aspects, including open access publishing, open/FAIR data, open source code and software, open evaluation, and citizen science. Our scoping review considered more than 14,000 published articles and reports and identified 196 of them that showed evidence of societal impact.

We found ample evidence of a wide range of societal impacts of citizen science. In fact, as shown in Figure 1, almost all existing published evidence focuses on this aspect of open science.

Fig. 1: Number of articles by type of Open Science (% of all articles). Image created by Eva Kormann.

The societal impacts attributed to open science in this literature primarily include positive impacts on education and awareness, on climate and the environment, promoting societal engagement with science and within communities, impacts on policy and governance, equity and empowerment, as well as on health and healthcare, trust in and attitudes towards science, and privacy and ethics.

Fig. 2: Number of articles by type of effect (% of all articles). Articles can have more than one type of effect. Image created by Eva Kormann.

Because most of the articles included in our society focused on citizen science and other forms of participatory, integrative research, most of the evidence on the types of impacts (see Figure 2) comes from these.

The results show that by opening up the scientific process to the participation of citizens of all ages and from communities around the world, a wide range of positive societal impacts can be achieved. Among the largest impacts are those we have classified as forms of education and awareness-raising. The results show that citizen science leads to an increase in professional and scientific knowledge and skills and promotes interest in science. Importantly, these benefits are not limited to project participants, but also extend to their families, social networks and communities.

There is also ample evidence that citizen science has positive impacts on our climate and the environment. The literature shows that participation in citizen science leads to positive changes in awareness, attitudes and values ​​about climate and environmental issues, as well as behavioral changes that benefit both. There is evidence that these impacts occur in a variety of areas, including conservation, biodiversity, pollution, natural resource management, and community development and activism.

And while we found evidence that data generated by citizen science projects can fill important gaps that allow communities and government agencies to better monitor climate and environmental issues, we found more limited evidence that citizen science or other aspects of open science have policy impact. Some even reported difficulties in achieving this. Sometimes there is a lack of respect for citizen science data and competing political and corporate interests in the policy-making process.

Evidence on societal impacts from other aspects of open science is limited. We found some evidence that open access publishing democratizes access to knowledge. Open access books have a more geographically diverse readership than books for sale, and open access publishing typically encourages more interaction on social media, blogs, and Wikipedia. However, these studies are largely based on altmetrics, which are used to measure the reach of a publication and the interaction with it, but not the societal impact of those publications beyond that.

In particular, we found no published evidence that open/FAIR data has societal impact. While there is some evidence that open government data has societal impact (which is outside the scope of our study), there was no evidence at the time of our study that open academic Data does this. This does not mean that open/FAIR data not create a social impact. That may well be the case. However, there are currently no studies that provide evidence that this happens.

It is clear that establishing the societal impact of open science requires significantly more research effort, particularly with regard to open/FAIR data, open source code and software, and open access publications. Admittedly, we recognize that this work is challenging because the use of an open science resource must first be tracked before the impact of using that resource can be assessed. On the other hand, the large amount of evidence from citizen science is likely due to the fact that there are established methods for assessing conditions before and after a citizen science project. It is relatively easy for a citizen science research team to build this type of impact assessment into any project.

Nevertheless, we can conclude that the opening of the scientific process leads to a wide range of positive societal impacts. This is an important finding, as science policy and funding for open science have so far tended to focus on encouraging and even requiring open results, and providing extensive and expensive infrastructure and platforms to achieve this. Typically, science policy and funding have placed far less emphasis on opening up the process. We hope that science policymakers and funders will take note of our findings and recognize the immense value of socially inclusive approaches in science.

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This post is based on the article “The societal impact of Open Science: a scoping review”, co-authored by the author, published in Royal Society Open Science.

The content generated in this blog is for informational purposes only. This article represents the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog) nor the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please read our comment policy if you have any concerns about publishing a comment below.

Photo credit: Featured image, Sergey Nivenson Shutterstock, author portrait: Thomas Klebel

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