Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2016 Jul 7:5:e16800.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.16800.

How open science helps researchers succeed

Erin C McKiernan  1 , Philip E Bourne  2 , C Titus Brown  3 , Stuart Buck  4 , Amye Kenall  5 , Jennifer Lin  6 , Damon McDougall  7 , Brian A Nosek  8 , Karthik Ram  9 , Courtney K Soderberg  8 , Jeffrey R Spies  8   10 , Kaitlin Thaney  11 , Andrew Updegrove  12 , Kara H Woo  13   14 , Tal Yarkoni  15
Affiliations

How open science helps researchers succeed

Erin C McKiernan et al. Elife. .

Abstract

Open access, open data, open source and other open scholarship practices are growing in popularity and necessity. However, widespread adoption of these practices has not yet been achieved. One reason is that researchers are uncertain about how sharing their work will affect their careers. We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices.

Keywords: none; open access; open data; open science; open source; research.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

ECM: Founder of the 'Why Open Research?' project, an open research advocacy and educational site funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation. She is also a figshare and PeerJ Preprints advisor, Center for Open Science ambassador, and OpenCon organizing committee member - all volunteer positions.

AK: Works at the open access publisher BioMed Central, a part of the larger SpringerNature company, where she leads initiatives around open data and research and oversees a portfolio of journals in the health sciences.

JL: Works for CrossRef and is involved in building infrastructure that supports open science research: Principles for Open Scholarly Research, open data initiatives, and open scholarly metadata.

BAN: Employed by the non-profit Center for Open Science, which runs the Open Science Framework, and includes in its mission "increasing openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research".

CKS: Employed by the non-profit Center for Open Science, which runs the Open Science Framework, and includes in its mission "increasing openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research".

JRS: Employed by the non-profit Center for Open Science, which runs the Open Science Framework, and includes in its mission "increasing openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research".

KT: Employed by the Mozilla Foundation, where she leads the organization's open science program - the Mozilla Science Lab. The Science Lab supports fellowships, training and prototyping, including work on open research badges.

The other authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Open access articles get more citations.
The relative citation rate (OA: non-OA) in 19 fields of research. This rate is defined as the mean citation rate of OA articles divided by the mean citation rate of non-OA articles. Multiple points for the same discipline indicate different estimates from the same study, or estimates from several studies. References by discipline: Agricultural studies (Kousha and Abdoli, 2010); Physics/astronomy (Gentil-Beccot et al., 2010; Harnad and Brody, 2004; Metcalfe, 2006); Medicine (Sahu et al., 2005; Xu et al., 2011); Computer science (Lawrence, 2001); Sociology/social sciences (Hajjem et al., 2006; Norris et al., 2008; Xu et al., 2011); Psychology (Hajjem et al., 2006); Political science (Hajjem et al., 2006; Antelman, 2004; Atchison and Bull, 2015); Management (Hajjem et al., 2006); Law (Donovan et al., 2015; Hajjem et al., 2006); Economics (Hajjem et al., 2006; McCabe and Snyder, 2015; Norris et al., 2008; Wohlrabe, 2014); Mathematics (Antelman, 2004; Davis and Fromerth, 2007; Norris et al., 2008); Health (Hajjem et al., 2006); Engineering (Antelman, 2004; Koler-Povh et al., 2014); Philosophy (Antelman, 2004); Education (Hajjem et al., 2006; Zawacki-Richter et al., 2010); Business (Hajjem et al., 2006; McCabe and Snyder, 2015); Communication studies (Zhang, 2006); Ecology (McCabe and Snyder, 2014; Norris et al., 2008); Biology (Frandsen, 2009b; Hajjem et al., 2006; McCabe and Snyder, 2014). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800.002
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. Increase in open access policies.
The number of open access policies registered in ROARMAP (roarmap.eprints.org) has increased over the last decade. Data are broken down by type of organization: research organization (e.g., a university or research institution); funder; subunit of research organization (e.g. a library within a university); funder and research organization; multiple research organizations (e.g., an organization with multiple research centers, such as Max Planck Society). Figure used with permission from Stevan Harnad. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800.005
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Adie E. Attention! A study of open access vs non-open access articles. Figshare. 2014 doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1213690. - DOI
    1. AllTrials All trials registered, all results reported. http://www.alltrials.net/ 2016 - PubMed
    1. American Society for Cell Biology San Francisco declaration on research assessment. http://www.ascb.org/dora/ 2013
    1. Antelman K. Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries. 2004;65:372–382. doi: 10.5860/crl.65.5.372. - DOI
    1. ASAPbio Opinions on preprints in biology. http://asapbio.org/survey. https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2247616.v1 2016

Publication types

MeSH terms