Awareness and Use of Open Research Practices: An International Survey of Researchers Across Disciplines
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Abstract
Aim: This mixed methods study investigates international researchers’ awareness and use of open research practices and explores variations across regions, disciplines, methodologies, and career stages. Methods: A total of 3,017 researchers across 45 countries and 24 disciplines completed the Brief Open Research Survey, reporting their awareness and use of eleven common open research practices and factors that would support their adoption. Results: Across the sample, respondents reported high awareness of Open Access Publications, Preprints, and Open Data and awareness only fell below 50% for Research Co-production and Registered Reports. Use was high for Open Access Publications, but fell below 50% for Preprints, Open Data, Open Research, Open Materials, Open Peer Review, Open Code, Preregistration, Research Co-production, Replication, and Registered Reports. Awareness and use varied across the sampled regions (e.g., Europe vs. Asia), disciplines (e.g., Psychology vs. Physical Sciences), methodologies (e.g., quantitative vs. qualitative), and career stages (e.g., PhD students vs. Professors). Respondents reported that the top five supportive strategies were incentives from funders, institutions and regulators; dedicated funding; recognition in promotion and recruitment criteria; more training; and more information. Qualitative responses provide insight into challenges and opportunities. Conclusions: Estimates of awareness can guide training initiatives, while estimates of use can inform policy development and longitudinal evaluations of behaviour change. Variations between regions, disciplines, methodologies, and career stages should be acknowledged.
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This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/19809365.
This is a high-quality paper that presents the results of a survey studying the awareness and use of open research practices across countries and disciplines.
I only have two minor comments, which are listed below.
The most significant limitation of the paper is the sampling approach, which has resulted in a very limited number of respondents from for instance Africa and Asia, and a strong dominance of respondents from Europe. Also, because the authors worked with Reproducibility Networks to invite researchers to participate in the survey, there is likely to be a bias toward researchers with a relatively strong interest in open research. While the authors acknowledge this limitation in …
This Zenodo record is a permanently preserved version of a PREreview. You can view the complete PREreview at https://prereview.org/reviews/19809365.
This is a high-quality paper that presents the results of a survey studying the awareness and use of open research practices across countries and disciplines.
I only have two minor comments, which are listed below.
The most significant limitation of the paper is the sampling approach, which has resulted in a very limited number of respondents from for instance Africa and Asia, and a strong dominance of respondents from Europe. Also, because the authors worked with Reproducibility Networks to invite researchers to participate in the survey, there is likely to be a bias toward researchers with a relatively strong interest in open research. While the authors acknowledge this limitation in their paper, I think they should put more emphasis on it. The authors could for instance also highlight this limitation in the abstract of their paper, where it is currently not mentioned.
On p. 7, "The study approved" should be "The study was approved".
Competing interests
The author declares that they have no competing interests.
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The author declares that they did not use generative AI to come up with new ideas for their review.
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