---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 14/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:05.253185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Economic and social development ===
The potential economic impact for open science research outputs is significant. Innovation commons are a major, although overlooked, source of economic growth: "The innovation commons is the true origin of innovation. It is the source from which the subsequent markers of innovation emerge — the entrepreneurial actors, the innovating firms, the new markets, and so on." 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".
In 2011, a JISC report estimated that there was 1.8 million knowledge workers in the United Kingdom working in R&D, IT, engineering services most of whom being "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 problems that has never been resolved. A 2011 survey of Danese business highlighted a significant dependence of R&D to academic research: "Forty-eight per cent rated research articles as very or extremely important". Consequently, lack or difficulty of access affects the development of commercial services and products: "It would have taken an average of 2.2 years longer to develop or introduce the new products or processes in the absence of contributing academic research. For new products, a 2.2 years delay would cost around DKK 36 million per firm in lost sales, and for new processes it would cost around DKK 211 000 per firm in lost savings." Research data repositories have also experimented with efficient data management workflows that can become a valuable inspiration for commercial structures: "properly designed data commons can serve to R&D processes as an active and accessible repository for research data".
Estimations of the global business impact of open science are challenged by another positive economic factor of open science: weak or even inexistent transactions costs. Commercial uses of open publications, data or software occurs unformaly and is hardly identifiable: "use of open science outputs (e.g., by firms) often leaves no obvious trace, so most evidence of impacts is based on interviews, surveys, inference based on existing costs, and modelling approaches." Concrete impact of open science on commercial products and activities has been measured at the scale of a few major projects. The Human Genome Project made all the progressively available results of human sequencing within 24 of discovery from 1990 to 2003. A retrospective assessment showed a very high return cost on investment: "a $3.8 billion project drove $796 billion in economic impact [and] created 310,000 jobs". Another case study focused on the incidence of opening data on a pharmaceutical compound, JQ1: 105 patents have been filed in the following years, in comparison with less than 30 for similar compounds.
Social impact has become an important focus of open science infrastructure in the late 2010s. Access to non-academic audiences has created a new potential justification for their funding and maintenance. Potential groups that may benefit from open access "include citizen scientists, medical patients and their supporting networks, health advocates, NGOs, and those who benefit from translation and transformation (e.g., sight-impaired people)."