---
title: "Uses of open science"
chunk: 1/9
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"
---

The open science movement has expanded the uses of scientific output beyond specialized academic circles.
Non-academic audience of journals and other scientific outputs has always been significant but was not recorded by the leading metrics of scientific reception, which favor citation data. In the late 1990s, the first open-access online publications started to attract a large number of individual visits. This transformation has renewed the theories of scientific dissemination, as direct access to publications curtailed the classic model of scientific popularization. Social impact and potential uses by lay readers have become focal points of discussion in the development of open science platforms and infrastructures.
Analysis of open science uses has required the development of new methods, including log analysis, crosslinking analysis or altmetrics, as the standard bibliometric approach failed to record the non-academic reception of scientific productions.
In the 2010s, several detailed studies were devoted to the reception of specific open science platforms due to the increasing availability of use data. Log analysis and surveys showed that professional academics do not make up the majority of the audience, as recurrent reader profiles include students, non-academic professionals (policy makers, industrial R&D, knowledge workers) and "private citizens" with various motivations (personal health, curiosity, hobby). Traffic on open science platforms is stimulated by a larger ecosystem of knowledge sharing and popularization, which includes non-academic productions like blogs. Non-academic audiences tend to prefer the use of local language, which has created new incentives in favor of linguistic diversity in science.

== Concepts and definition ==

=== Bibliometrics and its limitations ===
After the Second World War, the reception of scientific publications has been increasingly measured by quantitative counts of citations. The field of bibliometrics coalesced in parallel to the development of the first computed search engine, the Science Citation Index, originally established by Eugene Garfield in 1962. Founding figures of the field, like the British historian of science Derek John de Solla Price, were proponents of bibliometric reductionism, i.e., the reduction of all possible bibliometric indicators to citation data and citation graphs. Bibliometric indicators, like the Impact Factor, have had a significant influence over research policy and research evaluation since the 1970s.
Academic search engine, citation data collection and the related metrics were intentionally designed to favor English-speaking journals. Until the development of open science platforms, "very little [was] actually known about the impact of Latin American journals overall". The use of standard bibliometric indicators like the impact factor yielded a very limited outlook on the breadth and diversity of the academic publishing ecosystem in this region and other non-Western areas: "Putting aside issues of equity, the underrepresentation and shear low number of journals from developing countries mean that journals that are geared towards the developing world will have less of its citations counted than one geared towards journals that are in the dataset."
In the early developments, the open science movement partly coopted the standard tools of bibliometrics and quantitative evaluation: "the fact that no reference was made to metadata in the main OA declarations (Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda) has led to a paradoxical situation (…) it was through the use of the Web of Science that OA advocates were eager to show how much accessibility led to a citation advantage compared to paywalled articles." After 2000, an important bibliometric literature was devoted to the citation advantage of open access publications.
By the end of the 2000s, the impact factor and other metrics had been increasingly held responsible for a systemic lock-in of prestigious non-accessible sources. Key figures of the open science movement, such as Stevan Harnad, called for the creation of "open access scientometrics" that would take "advantage of the wealth of usage and impact metrics enabled by the multiplication of online, full-text, open access digital archives." As the public of open science expanded beyond academic circles, new metrics should aim for "measuring the broader societal impacts of scientific research."