The global push for Open Science

The Global Push for Open Science

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Table of Contents

Introduction

For a long time, research has been treated like a private club. If you wanted to read it, you had to pay expensive journal fees, almost like trying to get past a castle gate guarded by paywalls. Yet, a powerful, collective movement is now surging across continents, driven by researchers, funders, institutions, and citizens: Open Science. This isn’t just about making PDFs free to read. It’s a comprehensive cultural and structural shift aimed at revolutionizing how scientific knowledge is created, shared, and utilized for the benefit of all humanity.  

Open Science, in its fullest sense, advocates complete transparency and accessibility across the entire research lifecycle, from the initial hypothesis to the final publication, including all data, methods, and code in between. It is a necessary response to the digital age, which has rendered closed, proprietary systems anachronistic and increasingly indefensible.

The core philosophy behind this movement is simple, yet revolutionary: publicly funded research should be a public good. When taxpayers’ money funds a study, the results shouldn’t be locked away, accessible only to institutions that can afford exorbitant annual subscription fees. This antiquated system creates a fundamental injustice, widening the knowledge gap not just between the academic elite and the general public, but also between well-resourced institutions in the Global North and their counterparts in the Global South. 

Open Science seeks to democratize knowledge, ensuring that a researcher in a developing country, a local policymaker, or a curious student can access the latest findings with the same ease as a professor at a major research university. This shift is essential for accelerating discovery, enhancing research integrity, and making science more responsive and accountable to societal needs. The momentum is undeniable, with major international bodies like UNESCO and the European Union making Open Science a central pillar of their policy frameworks, signaling that this isn’t a fad, but the future of the scientific enterprise.

Defining the Pillars of Open Science

Open Science is an umbrella term that encompasses a constellation of interconnected practices, each aimed at increasing transparency and accessibility. Understanding the movement’s core pillars is crucial to grasping its transformative potential. These practices collectively represent a move away from the traditional, closed-loop research model towards a more inclusive, networked, and verifiable system. When all these pillars are embraced, the result is a scientific ecosystem that is more robust, reproducible, and ready to tackle global challenges with collective intelligence.

Open Scientific Knowledge

At its heart, Open Science champions open access to scientific publications, making the final, peer-reviewed articles immediately and freely available online. This is the movement’s most visible manifestation and is rapidly reshaping the landscape of scholarly communication. 

However, Open Scientific Knowledge extends beyond journal articles. It also includes Open Educational Resources (OER), open-source software and code used for analysis, and open hardware designs. If a piece of knowledge, tool, or resource is integral to the research process, it should be shared openly to allow others to reproduce, verify, and build upon the work without unnecessary barriers. This commitment to openness across all research outputs is what truly differentiates Open Science from past “free access” initiatives. The goal is a seamless, interlinked web of scholarly materials where every component is openly available and clearly licensed for reuse, accelerating the pace of scientific advancement and minimizing wasteful duplication of effort.

Open Data and the FAIR Principles

Perhaps the most critical and complex pillar of the Open Science movement is the demand for Open Research Data. The final published paper often only tells part of the story; the real power lies in the raw data, metadata, and computational notebooks that underpin the conclusions. Making this data openly available is a powerful deterrent to questionable research practices and a massive accelerator of discoveries, allowing scientists to reanalyze existing datasets to answer novel questions. Data sharing is complicated, however, by privacy concerns, ethical restrictions, and the sheer volume and complexity of modern datasets.

To navigate these challenges, the Open Science community coalesced around the FAIR Principles: research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. “Findable” means assigning persistent identifiers (like DOIs) and providing rich metadata so machines can discover the data. “Accessible” means data can be retrieved using standard communication protocols. “Interoperable” requires the use of shared vocabularies and open formats. 

Finally, “Reusable” is the ultimate goal, requiring clear usage licenses, detailed provenance information, and domain-relevant standards to allow others to repurpose the data fully. Open Data is the engine room of Open Science, transforming static research papers into dynamic, verifiable, and endlessly valuable resources. Without FAIR data, the promise of true scientific reproducibility remains unfulfilled, mainly leaving the current system prone to errors, biases, and a lack of transparency that erodes public trust.

Open Engagement and Citizen Science

Open Science isn’t just a discussion among academics. It actively seeks to break down the walls between the ivory tower and the rest of society through open engagement of societal actors. This pillar encompasses a range of practices, most notably Citizen Science, in which members of the public actively participate in the research process, contributing from data collection and classification to analyzing images and transcribing historical records. This not only gathers massive amounts of data that would be impossible for a small team of professional researchers but also fosters a crucial sense of shared ownership and appreciation for the scientific endeavor.

This engagement also includes involving policymakers, industry leaders, and non-governmental organizations earlier and more transparently in the research lifecycle. By opening up the research agenda and methodology to a broader dialogue, science becomes more responsive to real-world problems and societal needs. For too long, the public was seen as merely a passive recipient of scientific findings. The Open Science movement redefines the public as an active partner and stakeholder. This inclusion is vital for increasing scientific literacy and bolstering public confidence in the scientific method, which, let’s be honest, has never been more important than it is today.

Global Initiatives Driving the Change

The push for Open Science is not a grassroots movement alone; it is being propelled by major, coordinated international initiatives and powerful mandates from funding bodies and governments. These top-down drivers are crucial for overcoming inertia and changing the deeply entrenched incentive structures of the academic world.

The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

One of the most significant milestones in the global Open Science movement was the adoption of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science in November 2021. This document, adopted by 193 member states, is an unprecedented international instrument that establishes a global standard and common conceptual framework for Open Science. It provides a universal definition, a set of shared values, and a roadmap for action. It’s not legally binding like a treaty, but it carries immense moral and political weight, essentially telling every nation on the planet, “This is the direction the world is going, and you need to get on board.”

The Recommendation explicitly covers all key areas, from Open Access to publications and Open Research Data, to the importance of Open Science infrastructures and fostering international cooperation. Its strength lies in its global reach and its explicit acknowledgment that Open Science must be a tool for reducing inequalities, promoting equity, and addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It’s a powerful political statement that frames Open Science not as a niche academic concern, but as a critical mechanism for advancing global societal well-being. By providing a globally agreed-upon framework, UNESCO has created a lingua franca for policy discussions, making it easier for countries to coordinate their efforts and adopt mutually compatible policies.

Plan S and the Coalition S Funders

Plan S was an initiative launched in 2018 by cOAlition S, a consortium of major national research funders and philanthropic organizations from over a dozen European countries. Plan S is a hard mandate: by 2021, all scholarly publications resulting from research funded by cOAlition S members must be published in compliant open access journals or platforms, and authors must retain their copyright. Crucially, it prohibits publication in hybrid journals, which charge both subscription fees and APCs, a model that critics derisively refer to as “double-dipping.”

Plan S represented a direct, frontal assault on the traditional publishing business model. It forced both major commercial publishers and learned societies to accelerate their transition plans radically. The immediate effect was a surge in Transformative Agreements (TAs), often called “Publish and Read” agreements, where institutions pay a single fee to a publisher that covers both their subscription access and the APCs for their researchers to publish open access in that publisher’s journals. 

While TAs have their own critics, they have undeniably redirected substantial funds from subscriptions to open-access publishing, fundamentally altering the flow of money in the scholarly communications ecosystem. The mere existence of Plan S sent a clear message: the days of closed research are numbered, and the financial levers of power are shifting into the hands of the research funders.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

On the infrastructure front, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) stands as a monumental project aimed at creating a virtual environment where European researchers can store, manage, analyze, and reuse research data across borders and scientific disciplines. Envisioned as a “federation of data, services, and resources,” the EOSC is designed to make the FAIR principles a reality for millions of data objects. It is a secure, open-by-default, cloud-based ecosystem that eliminates the technological barriers to Open Science, providing researchers with the tools and computational power they need to handle the massive datasets of modern science.

The scale of the EOSC is immense, striving to connect institutional repositories, research infrastructures, and high-performance computing centers across all EU member states. It’s a testament to the idea that Open Science is a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure challenge as much as it is a policy or cultural one. By providing standardized, high-quality, and long-term sustainable infrastructure, the EOSC aims to ensure that European research remains competitive and that its data assets are preserved and leveraged for maximum societal and economic impact. This sort of coordinated, long-term investment in common infrastructure is a powerful blueprint for other regions to follow.

The shift to Open Science is inextricably linked to advancements in publishing technologies and emerging trends that redefine what a “publication” actually is. The digital revolution didn’t just digitize print. It fundamentally changed the very structure of scholarly output, moving from static, linear documents to dynamic, interlinked, and granular research objects.

Preprints, Versioning, and Rapid Sharing

One of the most noticeable recent trends is the explosion in the use of preprints: full drafts of scientific papers posted publicly online before formal peer review and journal publication. Platforms like arXiv (for physics and math) have existed for decades, but the model has now spread rapidly across fields, most notably in biomedicine with servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a massive accelerator, underscoring the vital need for rapid knowledge sharing to address a global crisis. The data from the pandemic showed that preprints were often the first place to find critical, emerging research, significantly speeding up the scientific response.

The use of preprints introduces the concept of versioning into scholarly communication, recognizing that research is an iterative process rather than a singular, final product. A single research project can now generate a series of publicly available outputs: a pre-registration document (the planned study protocol), a preprint (the first draft of the manuscript), the peer review reports (open peer review), the Version of Record (the final, formally published article), and the underlying data and code. This granular, versioned approach makes the entire research process transparent and auditable, a stark contrast to the opaque, one-and-done publication model of the past.

Next-Generation Metrics and Research Assessment

The old academic reward system, often satirized as the “publish or perish” mantra, is primarily based on where a researcher publishes, often relying on the journal’s Impact Factor as a proxy for the quality of the work. This system is a major barrier to Open Science, as it incentivizes publishing in a small number of high-impact, often closed-access journals. A crucial part of the Open Science push is the adoption of Next-Generation Metrics, or Altmetrics, which track the broader impact of all research outputs, not just the final paper.

Altmetrics go beyond traditional citation counts to measure things like how often a dataset is reused, a piece of code is downloaded, a preprint is discussed on X (formerly Twitter), or an article is cited in a policy document. This shifts the focus from the prestige of the container (the journal) to the quality and societal impact of the content itself. Major international groups, such as the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), are actively working to reform the entire system, urging universities and funding agencies to formally recognize and reward researchers for Open Science practices like data sharing, open peer review, and citizen science contributions in their hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions. Without changing the metrics and rewards, researchers will continue to game the old system, regardless of new Open Science policies.

The Role of Persistent Identifiers and Interoperability

The seamless functioning of Open Science relies heavily on robust digital infrastructure, specifically Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). If research objects are to be Findable and Interoperable, they need permanent, globally unique tags. The most common PID is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for articles, but the concept has expanded. The ORCID iD uniquely identifies researchers, tying all their various outputs (publications, grants, peer reviews) back to them, regardless of name changes or institutional affiliations. ROR (Research Organization Registry) IDs uniquely identify research institutions. PIDs for data (e.g., DataCite DOIs) and even software are now standard practice.

These PIDs are the unsung heroes of Open Science. They are the digital glue that binds the entire research ecosystem. They allow automated systems to track provenance, calculate impact metrics accurately, and ensure that a dataset shared in a repository remains linked to the original publication, even if that publication moves platforms. The push for interoperability means ensuring that all these PIDs and the underlying metadata are machine-readable, allowing computers to understand and connect research outputs across different platforms and institutions.

Challenges and the Global Equity Imperative

The Open Science movement, for all its revolutionary potential, is not without its significant challenges. Transitioning a centuries-old global system of knowledge production and dissemination is a complex undertaking, riddled with socio-cultural, technical, and, perhaps most acutely, economic obstacles. Successfully navigating these hurdles requires far more than good intentions; it demands coordinated global policy and a firm commitment to equitable implementation.

The Cost Barrier and the APC Conundrum

The most immediate and contentious challenge is the cost of publishing. While open access makes content free for readers, the costs of peer review, editing, and platform maintenance don’t simply vanish. The dominant economic model for Gold Open Access is the Article Processing Charge (APC), which is typically paid by the author, their institution, or their funder. Some high-prestige journals charge exorbitant APCs, sometimes exceeding $10,000 per article. The irony is stark: open access, intended to dismantle paywalls, often replaces the reader’s subscription fee with a significant author-side paywall.

This APC model poses a grave threat to global equity. Researchers in lower- and middle-income countries, or those without major grant funding, may be entirely priced out of publishing in high-prestige open access venues. Even in wealthy nations, early-career researchers and those in the humanities and social sciences, where funding structures differ, are disadvantaged. The push to transition to Open Science cannot be allowed to merely solidify a new, two-tiered system where only the richest institutions can afford to publish and read. Alternative models, such as funder-led agreements, institutional subsidies, and diamond open access (journals with no reader or author fees, often supported by consortia or institutional funding), are desperately needed to ensure a truly equitable transition.

The Cultural Shift and Incentive Structures

Scientific culture is notoriously conservative, and changing human behavior is among the hardest things to do. Many researchers, particularly senior academics, are deeply conditioned to value publication in high-impact factor, traditionally closed-access journals. They see the extra time required for Open Science practices as a burden on an already overstretched workload. This perception is rooted in the academic reward system. Until universities formally and consistently reward openness in tenure and promotion decisions, a researcher’s rational career move will often be to prioritize the status quo.

This cultural challenge requires a massive, long-term effort in capacity building and education. Researchers need to be taught how to practice Open Science effectively, from basic data management planning to using open-source tools. Institutions and funders must stop merely mandating Open Science and start actively enabling it, providing the necessary training, infrastructure support, and clear policies that integrate open practices seamlessly into the research workflow. The focus must move from simply demanding compliance to fostering a new generation of researchers for whom openness and transparency are the default, not an optional extra.

Data Privacy, Security, and Sensitive Information

Not all research can, or should, be made completely open. The principle is “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.” This is particularly true for research involving sensitive data, such as patient health records, indigenous knowledge, national security information, or endangered species locations. Ethical and legal constraints, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), mandate strict controls on personal data. Balancing the imperative of transparency and reproducibility with the fundamental rights to privacy and confidentiality is a delicate act.

Open Science is not synonymous with indiscriminate data dumps. It requires the development of secure, governed data access mechanisms, often called trusted repositories or data enclaves, where researchers can gain access to sensitive datasets under strict ethical and legal conditions. Furthermore, in dealing with indigenous and traditional knowledge, the Open Science movement must respect principles of data sovereignty, ensuring that the communities that generated the knowledge control how it is shared and used. This complexity necessitates sophisticated, nuanced policy and technological solutions that recognize the ethical and legal limits of openness while maximizing the overall benefit of the research.

Conclusion

The Global Push for Open Science is much more than a set of publishing protocols. It represents a fundamental moral and intellectual realignment of the scientific enterprise with the public good. Driven by the confluence of digital technology, funder mandates, and growing recognition of science’s role in tackling global crises such as climate change and pandemics, the movement is irrevocably changing the landscape of scholarly publishing. From the proliferation of preprints and the rise of transformative agreements to the ambitious infrastructure of the European Open Science Cloud, the momentum is undeniable. Statistics such as the surge in Gold Open Access articles, which grew from a negligible share to nearly one-third of global output in two decades, clearly demonstrate that the tipping point has been reached and passed.

However, the job is far from finished. The transition to Open Science will only be a true success if it addresses the deep-seated challenges of global equity and cultural inertia. We must reject models, particularly high-cost APCs, that risk creating a new financial divide, and instead champion sustainable, community-controlled publishing and infrastructure. Furthermore, institutions must courageously reform their antiquated reward systems to recognize and celebrate researchers who embrace transparency and openness. The ultimate goal is a global research ecosystem that is fully transparent, maximally efficient, and universally accessible, ensuring that scientific progress benefits everyone, everywhere. The future of publishing is open, and the world is better for it.

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