Open science progress: A literature assessment of open access articles

Abstract

The open science movement has been widely adopted in multiple scientific fields across nations. Its benefit has been proven in many cases, most notably when the practice accelerated the search for solutions to the Covid-19 pandemic both in medical and socio-economic contexts. Still, the movement has faced multiple challenges, including an imbalance in the adoption of its numerous aspects. For example, the open access aspect which indicates the starting point of the movement has been widely practiced. Unfortunately, while open access is essential, an open access practice alone is not enough to pursue open science. In this work, we would like to assess the imbalance of the adoption, especially to measure how open access practice contributes to other practices, namely open data and open source as a sub-aspect of the open reproducibility research. Our assessment is based on descriptive statistic analysis of 300 open access articles from three domains, that is engineering, social and life science. Our findings indicated that the free and open source computer codes were dominantly adopted by the three scientific fields. However, social science has the lowest involvement in public data.