Benefits and obstacles of openness in science: an analytical framework illustrated with case study evidence from Argentina

ARZA, VALERIA; FRESSOLI, MARIANO

Brighton

Conferencia; SPRU 50th Anniversary Conference; 2016

University of Sussex

Doing open science is to collaborate openly with others in a scientific endeavor and to share openly the outcomes of the scientific process. Benefits of open science are plenty and diverse, ranging from increasing research productivity, to empowering local population and other participants in the scientific process, to improving the democratization of science. However, there are many meanings and practices of open science and thus when analyzing concrete open science initiatives one finds a full lot of hybrid forms of openness. We identify and discuss the different aspects, elements and meanings 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. We propose a bi-dimensional framework to characterize openness along research stages. The first dimension accounts for the characteristics of the collaboration, while the second takes into consideration aspects of access and accessibility of shared outputs. Our framework allows us to characterize different open science initiatives in this bi-dimensional space and to anticipate the type of benefits and obstacles to be expected. We illustrate our framework by discussing four Argentinean open science initiatives.