---
title: "Uses of open science"
chunk: 2/9
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"
---

=== Non-academic audience ===
Academic journals have always had a significant non-academic audience, be they students, professionals, or amateurs. In 2000, one-third of these readers had never authored a scientific publication. This rate may be higher for social science journals, which may also act as intellectual periodicals. During the second half of the 20th century, the non-academic audience may have continuously expanded in Western countries, along with the increasing prevalence of high school education: "the percentage of U.S. adults with a minimal level of understanding of the meaning of scientific study has increased from 12 percent in 1957 to 21 percent in 1999".
The prevalence of non-academic audience raises additional issues on the relevance and scope of classic bibliometric measures, as they would "never appear in citation data". The infrastructures and business models put in place by leading scientific publishers do not consider non-academic uses. Following the periodical crisis of the 1980s and the inflation of subscription prices, major journals have largely become unattainable for lay readers or independent researchers not affiliated with a large research institution. Search engines and bibliographic databases developed since the 1960s and the 1970s were meant to be used by professional librarians. Leading scientific publishers tacitly rely on a "gap" model of scientific reception, where specialized scientific knowledge is not directly accessible but mediated and popularized.
The shift of academic journals to electronic publishing and open access has underlined the significant discrepancy between the measures of citation counts. By the late 1990s, online journals and archive repositories had evidently attracted a very large audience: "Within individual disciplines the change has been nearly instantaneous. As an example, in mid-1997 the number of papers downloaded from astronomy's digital library, the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS; ads.harvard.edu) exceeded the sum of all the papers read in all of astronomy's print libraries". Log studies have regularly underlined that publication of open access has a much higher rate of use and downloading than publications behind a paywall.
The enlargement of the audience of scientific work to non-academic has always been a key objective of the open access movement: "even the earliest formulations of the concept of open access included the general public as a potential audience for open access". The Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2001 includes among the beneficiaries of open access "scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds".
In an open science context, non-academic audience has been associated with a wider figure: the lay reader or unexpected reader.  Once universally accessible, an academic work can have unplanned readers or users. In 2006, John Willinsky conjectured that "it is not difficult to imagine occasions when a dedicated history teacher, an especially keen high school student, an amateur astronomer, or an ecologically concerned citizen might welcome the opportunity to browse the current and relevant literature pertaining to their interests." Unexpected forms of reception did happen as the Editor in chief of PLOS once received a promising research on the modelling of pandemics, which turned out to be written by "a fifteen-year old high school student". The lay reader is not necessarily part of a non-academic audience, as a professional scientist may become one if "the information sought is outside his or her area of expertise". Not all unexpected readers behave similarly or have the same capacity of using academic resources. Even where they are not dealing with their main domain of expertise, academic researchers or some professionals (the knowledge workers) have acquired some generic skills for bibliographic analysis, such as following citations in the literature.

=== Unanticipated academic uses ===
Paywalled journals did not satisfy a larger range of unanticipated academic uses, as the costs of subscription access have been conditioned on the field of work or the available resources at the institutional level. In 2011, Michael Carroll introduced a typology of five "unanticipated readers" which are beyond the scope of the reading expectations of online academic journals: serendipitous readers (who discover the publication through complex reading paths), the under-resourced readers (presumably uninitiated, like high school students) interdisciplinary readers (scientists that belong to a different field) international readers (scientist that work within a different national frame) and machine readers (bots that retrieve a corpus, for instance as part of a text mining project).
The development of academic pirate platforms like Sci-Hub or Libgen highlighted structural inequalities on a global scale: "The geography of Sci-Hub usage generally looks like a map of scientific productivity, but with some of the richer and poorer science-focused nations flipped." High rates of sci-hub use have been especially found in Russia, Algeria, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and India, which are all countries with significant local academic productions despite having fewer resources than OECD countries: "relatively to their national scientific production, middle-income countries had the more intensive use of pirated academic works". The audience of pirate academic platforms remains significant even in North American and European universities endowed with large library subscriptions, as access is commonly perceived as more straightforward than in paywalled libraries: "even for journals to which the university has access, Sci-Hub is becoming the go-to resource".

=== From impact factor to social impact ===
The development of large open science platforms and infrastructure after 2010 entailed a shift in the measurement of scientific impact, from a strong focus on highly quoted English-speaking journals to an expanded analysis of the social circulation of scientific publications. This transformation has been especially noticeable in Latin America, due to the early development of public-funded international publishing platforms like Redalyc, or Scielo: "There is a definite sense in Latin America that the investment in science will result in development in a more broadly defined sense—beyond simply innovation and economic growth."
In 2015, Juan Pablo Alperin introduced a systematic measure of social impact by relying on a diverse set of indicators (log analysis, survey and altmetrics). This approach entailed a conceptual redefinition of key concepts of scientific reception, such as impact, reach or reader: