Benefits and obstacles of openness in science: an analytical framework

ARZA, VALERIA; FRESSOLI, MARIANO

Curitiba

Jornada; XI JORNADAS LATINO AMERICANAS DE ESTUDIOS SOCIALES DE LA CIENCIA Y LA TECNOLOGÍA; 2016

Doing open science is to collaborate openly with others in a scientific endeavor and to share openlythe outcomes of the scientific process. Benefits of open science are plenty and diverse, ranging fromincreasing research productivity, to empowering local population and other participants in thescientific process, to improving the democratization of science. However, there are many meaningsand practices of open science and thus when analyzing concrete open science initiatives one finds afull lot of hybrid forms of openness. We identify and discuss the different aspects, elements andmeanings of open science and their benefits and obstacles as they were discussed in the literature.Our claim is that both benefits and barriers are somehow related to how openness is achieved. Wepropose a bi-dimensional framework to characterize openness along research stages. The firstdimension accounts for the characteristics of the collaboration, while the second takes intoconsideration aspects of access and accessibility of shared outputs. Our framework allows us tocharacterize different open science initiatives in this bi-dimensional space and to anticipate the typeof benefits and obstacles to be expected. We illustrate our framework by discussing four Argentineanopen science initiatives.