---
title: "Uses of open science"
chunk: 5/9
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"
---

=== Altmetrics ===
During the 2000s and 2010s, the web was increasingly dominated by very large social media platforms that curate and shape a significant part of the digital public sphere. The public reception of scientific literature has also largely migrated to these platforms. This evolution has prompted the development of new metrics and quantitative methods aiming to map the circulation of publications on social media: the altmetrics.
The concept of alt-metrics was introduced in 2009 by Cameron Neylon and Shirly Wu as article-level metrics. In contrast with the focus of leading metrics on journals (impact factor) or, more recently, on individual researchers (h-index), the article-level metrics makes it possible to track the circulation of individual publications: "article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero – where we can see and count it" As such they are more compatible with the diversity of publication strategies that has characterized open science: preprints, reports or even non-textual outputs like dataset or software may also have associated metrics. In their original research proposition, Neylon and Wu favored the use of data from reference management software like Zotero or Mendeley. The concept of altmetrics evolved and came to cover data extracted "from social media applications, like blogs, Twitter, ResearchGate and Mendeley." Social media sources proved especially to be more reliable on a long-term basis, as specialized academic tools like Mendeley came to be integrated into a proprietary ecosystem developed by leading scientific publishers. Major altmetrics indicators that emerged in the 2010s include Altmetric.com, PLUMx and ImpactStory.
As the meaning of altmetrics shifted, the debate over the positive impact of the metrics evolved toward their redefinition in an open science ecosystem: "Discussions on the misuse of metrics and their interpretation put metrics themselves in the center of open science practices." Social media altmetrics are limited to a specific subset of social media platforms and, within the platforms, to numeric metrics of reception let by users such as likes, shares or comments: "However, 'altmetrics' has continued in the same tradition as the older biblio/scientometrics by basing its indicators on numerical trace, i.e., computing the number of likes, posts, downloads, tweets or retweets a scholarly publication gets on the web with the result that neither of these fields provide information on the actual use of the scholarly publications cited nor the reasons for which they were cited."
While altmetrics were initially conceived for open science publications and their expanded circulation beyond academic circles, their compatibility with the emerging requirements for open metrics has been brought into question: social network data, in particular, is far from transparent and readily accessible. The conversation tracked on social media may not be that representative of the social impact of research, as researchers are overly represented in these spaces: "about half of the tweets mentioning journal articles are from academics". In 2016, Ulrich Herb published a systematic assessment of the leading publications' metrics in regard to open science principles and concluded that "neither citation-based impact metrics nor alternative metrics can be labeled open metrics. They all lack scientific foundation, transparency and verifiability."

== Current uses ==
Most empirical information retrieved on open science use is platform-specific.

=== User demographics ===

Studies of the use of open science resources have generally highlighted the diversity of user profiles, with academic researchers only representing a minor segment of the audience. In 2015, the two leading Latin American platforms, Redalyc and SciELO, had mostly an audience of university students (with 50% and 55% respectively) and professionals in non-academic sectors (20% in SciELO and 17% in Redalyc). Once discounted from other university employees, "researchers only make up 5–6% of the total users". On the Finnish platform journal.fi, students are also the main demographic group (with 40% of users), but academic researchers still make up for a large group (36%).
Convergent estimations of lay readers have been given by the different open science platform studies: 9% of amateur/personal uses in SciELO and 6% in Redalyc, 8% of "private citizens" in the reader survey of journal.fi.
Open science platforms have a balanced gender distribution. The two Latin American platforms, Redalyc and Scielo, tend to have a relative "predominance of women users" (about 60%).
The discipline of the resources' impact has a varying impact on uses. Personal interest is more prevalent in the humanities in SciELO. In contrast, "little variability between disciplines" has been observed in Redalyc. Analysis of the bookmark data left by the readers of F1000Prime on Mendeley highlighted a significant share of uses by disciplines totally distinct from the expected audience.