---
title: "Uses of open science"
chunk: 6/9
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:50:26.910892+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== User practices and motivations ===
Studies of user practices have mostly focused on specific user profiles. Few general surveys have been undertaken. In Japan, a 2011  poll of 800 adults showed that a "majority of respondents (55%) claimed that Open Access is useful or slightly useful to them", which suggests a rather large awareness of open science in a population with a significant share of high school education.
The issues facing medical patients have been especially highlighted. An important field of research on health-information-seeking behavior (HISB) emerged prior to the development of open science. In a 2003 survey, half of American Internet users had attempted to find qualified information about their health, but regularly faced access issues: "Many current Internet health users want to expand access to information-laden sites that are currently closed to non-subscribers". A qualitative research on English medical patients, subscription paywalls were cited as the main barrier to access to scientific knowledge, along with the complexity of scientific terminology. While the specific needs patients make a strong case for open science, they have also overshadowed the variety of potential uses of academic research: "open access is not just a public health matter: It has a much more general research-enhancing mission".
Research has also focused on professional non-academic uses, due to their potential economic impact. In 2011, a JISC report estimated that there were 1.8 million knowledge workers in the United Kingdom working in R&D, IT, and engineering services, most of whom were "unaffiliated, without corporate library or information center support." Among a representative set of English knowledge workers, 25% stated that access to the literature was fairly difficult or very difficult and 17% had a recent access problem that had never been resolved. A 2011 survey of Danish businesses highlighted a significant dependence of R&D to academic research: "Forty-eight per cent rated research articles as very or extremely important". The non-profit sector is also significantly impacted by increasing access to literature, as a survey of 101 NGOs from the United Kingdom showed that "73% reported using journal articles and 54% used conference proceedings". In 2018, a log analysis on OpenEdition highlighted  corporate access as a significant source of readership, especially among "the aircraft industry, the bank, insurance, car selling and energy sectors and, even more significantly for the further circulation of science in the public sphere, media organizations." These results showed that open access had a direct commercial impact on small and large companies.

=== Language diversity ===
Scientific publications in languages other than English have been marginalized in large commercial databases: they represent less than 5% of the publications indexed in the Web of Science.
The development of open science platforms has gradually shifted the focus, with local-language publications becoming acknowledged as important actors in the social dissemination of scientific knowledge. In the 2010s, quantitative studies have started to highlight the positive impact of local languages on the reuse of open access resources in varied national contexts such as Finland, Québec, Croatia or Mexico.
Measures of social impact tend to reverse the incentives of international academic metrics like the impact factors: while they are less featured in academic indices, publications in a local language fare better on an enlarged audience. In Finland, a majority of the audience of the academic platform journal.fi favors publications in Finnish (67%). Yet, the linguistic practices of the visitors vary significantly depending on their academic status. Lay readers (private citizens) and students have a clear preference for the local language (81% and 78% of publications accessed). In contrast, professional researchers slightly favor English over Finnish (55%).
Due to the ease of access, open science platforms in a local language can also achieve a broader reach. The French-Canadian journal consortium Érudit has mostly an international audience, with less than one-third of the readers coming from Canada.

=== Sharing ecosystem ===
Open science resources are more likely to be shared in non-scientific settings such as "Twitter, News, Blogs and Policies". In 2011, a log analysis study in Japan highlighted "a remarkable variety of websites linked to these OA papers, including blogs about personal hobbies, websites by patients or their families, Q&A website and Wikipedia."
The diversity of the open science ecosystem has been hypothesized to affect the life cycle pattern. In the classic framework of bibliometrics, most publications are expected to experience an exponential decline in citations over the year (also characterized as "half-life", by assimilation with the decay of radioactive elements). In contrast, open science publications "have the feature of keeping sustained and steady downloads for a long time". This sustained reception on a longer timeframe may be partially caused by recurrent episodes of "unexpected access": where old publications attract  a new wave of readers suddenly due to a newfound relevance.

=== Reuse of data and software ===
In contrast with publications, open scientific data and software frequently require a higher level of technical skills: "access is not enough to guarantee that Open Data can be reused effectively because reuse requires not only access, but other resources such as skills, money and computing power". Even firms and organizations may lack the "necessary skills such as information literacy to fully benefit from open resources".
Yet, recent developments like the growth of data analytics services across a large variety of economic sectors have created further needs for research data: "There are many other values (…) that are promoted through the longterm stewardship and open availability of research data. The rapidly expanding area of artificial intelligence (AI) relies to a great extent on saved data." In 2019, the combined data market of the 27 countries of the European Union and the United Kingdom was estimated at 400 billion euros and had a sustained growth of 7.6% per year. although no estimation was given of the specific value of research data, research institutions were identified as important stakeholders in the emerging ecosystem of "data commons".

== References ==

== Bibliography ==