---
title: "Open science monitor"
chunk: 2/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science_monitor"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:41.653595+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The first open science monitors were created in the 2000s and the early 2010s. They were usually conceived as a natural outgrowth of new national and international policy in favor of open access and open science. The Berlin Declaration from 2003 especially introduced the concept of a global "transition of scientific publishing toward an open access system" which require "information on publication output and on subscription and publication fees."
Additionally the diversification of open science publishing into various publication venues (journals, repositories, overlay journals...) and formats (articles, conferences, datasets...) created unprecedented challenges.
One of the earliest form of open science monitor was the Dutch project NARCIS ("National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System") that started operating in December 2005. NARCIS is primarily a national scientific portal that aims to integrate "all kinds of types of information from scientific institutes in the Netherlands." Yet it also has a special focus on "academic OAI repositories" and publishes global statistics on the rate of open  restricted and embargoed scientific works since 2000.
By 2013, Finland pioneered the influential Jyväskylä Model through its national portal JUULI. First experimented at the Open Science Centre of the University of Jyväskyl this approach aims "to centralize all aspects of the self-archiving and open access processes lying within the responsibility of the professionals at the university library" in order to ease the process of data collection: "Researchers do as little as possible and, in some cases, nothing at all."

=== From open access to open science ===
After 2015, the European Union started to implement ambitious programs and goals within its own funding mechanism like Horizon 2020. This created an unprecedented impetus for the development of monitoring tools and methodologies at a supranational scale: "there has also been a general push for increased monitoring, aiming for both increased transparency to enable each country to see what others are doing" By 2018, 81% of the scientific organizations from Science Europe stated that they "planned to develop Open Access monitoring mechanisms in the future"
In their preparatory work of the Open Science Monitor, Smith et al. underlined that "open science is much more than simply open access, despite the fact that open access tends to dominate discussions at present." Beyond research publications, their approach singled out open research data and a wider range of Communication activities related to open science that included preprints, evaluations, comments and online discussions on social networks.
In May 2018, the European Commission unveiled its plan for a European Open Science Monitor, through a detailed methodological note. While the core features of the Monitor were in line with previous research, it was also announced that Elsevier would be the leading subcontractor for the creation for the platform, despite the past commitments of the academic publisher against open science, and the metrics would combine the metadata of Scopus and Unpaywall to assess the rate of open access publications. The proposal was met with significant backlash, with nearly 1000 researchers and open science activists signing a formal complaint to European Ombudsman. In an oped to the Guardian, Jon Tennant stated that "it is a cruel irony that Elsevier are to be paid to monitor the very system that they have historically fought against."
The European Science Monitor has been subsequently reworked in a different direction. As of 2023, the website only include data only up to 2018. In 2022, the European Council clearly states that "data and bibliographic databases used for research assessment should, in principle, be openly accessible and that tools and technical systems should enable transparency".
The European Open Science Monitor has entailed a significant shift in the objectives and ambitions of similar projects in the member states. In 2018, the French feedback for the Monitor included a detailed plan for the elaboration of open science indicators beyond publications that would prove to have a direct influence over the Barometer of open science

== Sources ==
Yet, open science monitors have to deal with different sources of scientific data, since currently "no database provides an easy and complete answer". Consequently, "for most monitoring exercises, data from multiple sources will need to be gathered, aggregated, and reconciled"
The most important sources available for open science monitors include international open science infrastructures, local sources and proprietary platforms. The choice of sources is frequently dictated by policy concerns and technical constraints. The United Kingdom or Germany lack a "pool of data" from local sources and consequently decided to rely significantly on proprietary databases like Dimensions, Wos or Scopus. Conversely, the French Open Science Monitor opted for a "constitutive choice" of open sources.

=== International Infrastructures ===
Leading open science infrastructures commonly used in open science monitor include, Unpaywall, Crossref and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Crossref is the primary information source of the French Open Science Monitor, as it only considers "publications associated with a Crossref DOI"
Due to significant developments during the 2010s, international infrastructure have a larger scope of "publications, languages and sources" than proprietary databases. Yet "they offer insufficiently standardized metadata, which complicates their collection and processing" and may lack key information for the creation of the open science monitors, such as author affiliations.