The academic impact of Open Science: a scoping review

Open Science seeks to make research processes and outputs more accessible, transparent, andinclusive, ensuring that scientific findings can be freely shared, scrutinised, and built-upon byresearchers and others. To date, there has been no systematic synthesis of the extent to which OpenScience reaches these aims. We use the PRISMA scoping review methodology to partially addressthis gap, scoping evidence on the academic (but not societal or economic) impacts of OS. Weidentify 489 studies related to all aspects of OS, including Open Access (OA), Open/FAIR Data(OFD), Open Code/Software, Open Evaluation, and Citizen Science (CS). Analysing andsynthesising findings, we show that the majority of studies investigated effects of OA, CS, andOFD. Key areas of impact studied are citations, quality, efficiency, equity, reuse, ethics, andreproducibility, with most studies reporting positive or at least mixed impacts. However, we alsoidentified significant unintended negative impacts, especially those regarding equity, diversity andinclusion. Overall, the main barrier to academic impact of OS is lack of skills, resources, andinfrastructure to effectively reuse and build on existing research. Building on this synthesis weidentify gaps within this literature and draw implications for future research and policy.