---
title: "Open science monitor"
chunk: 1/4
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"
---

An open science monitor or open access monitor is a scientific framework that aims to assess the spread of open practices in a scientific context.
Open science monitors or dashboards are built at different scales: from institutional to national or international. They require an accurate assessment of the total scientific output and a further breakdown between open and closed content. They rely on a variety of data sources and methodologies to achieve this end. Consequently, open science monitors have also become relevant tools for bibliometric analysis.
While initially conceived to track publications in academic journals, open science monitor have diversify their scopes and indicators. A recent trend has been to map other major outputs of open science research such as datasets, software or clinical trials.

== Definition ==
Open science monitor are a scientific infrastructure that provide a "good knowledge of the state" of scientific outputs and their "open access rate". They are also a policy tool that aims to better assess the discrepancy between actual practices and long-term objectives: they "can inform future strategies at institutional and national levels, provides guidance for policy development and review, helps to assess the effects of funding mechanisms and is crucial to negotiate transformative agreements with traditional subscription publishers."
Open Access Monitors are a specific variant of open science monitors, that is focused on open access publications. They aim to track the share of open access among journal articles, but also "books, book chapters, proceedings, and other publication types". In contrast, generic open science monitors have a more expansive scope and will in effect include all forms of scientific outputs and activities: "By definition, open science concerns the entire cycle of the scientific process, not only open access to publications"
Nearly all the open science monitor have been created at a national scale, as part of a general policy of enhanced visibility of public costs and investments in regards to scientific publications. Major examples include the Baromètre de la science ouverte in France, the Open Access Monitor in Germany, JUULI in Finland, the Open Access Barometer in Denmark, NARCIS and later openaccess.nl in the Netherlands and the Swiss Open Access Monitor. A prototype of open science monitor was also conceived in the United Kingdom in 2017 but "apparently not realized."
International initiatives include the Australian-based Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (CUKI), the Open Science Monitor of the European Union and OpenAIRE. Yet, the spread of their data is more limited than national monitors, as they do "not offer evaluation options on an institutional level".

== History ==

=== Context ===
Open science monitors belong to a global ecosystem of open scientific infrastructures. This ecosystem emerged in the first decades of the 21st century as an alternative to the closed infrastructures built by large scientific publishers and analytic companies.
After the Second World War, scientific publishing faced a "periodical crisis": funders, institutions and journals could not keep up with the rapidly increasing scientific output. New infrastructure, tools have to be developed also to keep track of scientific investment. Due to the limited success of public initiatives like SCITEL or MEDLINE in the United States, large private organizations filled this need. In 1963, Eugene Garfield created the Institute for Scientific Information that aimed to transform the projects initially envisioned with the Federal administration into a profitable business. The Science Citation Index and, later, the Web of Science had a massive and lasting influence on global scientific publication in the last decades of the 20th century, as its most important metrics, the Journal Impact Factor, "ultimately came to provide the metric tool needed to structure a competitive market among journal. Consequently funders increasingly relied on analytics created by the Science Citation Index and its main competitors to assess the performance of institutions or individual researchers.
After 1990, leading academic publishers started to diversify their activities beyond publishing and moved "from a content-provision to a data analytics business." By 2019, Elsevier has either acquired or built a large portofolio platforms, tools, databases and indicators covering all aspects and stages of scientific research: "the largest supplier of academic journals is also in charge of evaluating and validating research quality and impact (e.g., Pure, Plum Analytics, Sci Val), identifying academic experts for potential employers (e.g., Expert Lookup5), managing the research networking platforms through which to collaborate (e.g., SSRN, Hivebench, Mendeley), managing the tools through which to find funding (e.g., Plum X, Mendeley, Sci Val), and controlling the platforms through which to analyze and store researchers' data (e.g., Hivebench, Mendeley)." Metrics and indicators are key components of this vertical integration: "Elsevier's further move to offering metrics-based decision making is simultaneously a move to gain further influence in the entirety of the knowledge production process, as well as to further monetize its disproportionate ownership of content." The new market for scientific publication and scientific data has been compared with the business models of social networks, search engines and other forms of platform capitalism While content access is free, it is indirectly paid through data extraction and surveillance.

=== Early developments ===