Open Science in Spain: Towards a Coordinated Strategy

Research is being transformed by transparency, collaboration, public engagement and shareability, which are key elements of the Open Science (OS) movement. Open Access (OA), one of its main areas of action, aims to make all research freely available. Benefits of OA have already triggered a shift toward its implementation at the European and international level, with funders creating new platforms to support an ecosystem of open publications and data. Despite remarkable early contributions by Spain in terms of OS pilot initiatives and specifically OA publication performance, the latter has declined by more than a third since 2016. Moreover, no new indicators have been put forward since, even though openness remains to be deemed a strength. In this policy memo, we examine policy options to support OS in the country, with a focus on OA. These could be structured by a National Strategy for Openness, including actions to ensure OA for all publicly funded research, standardization of procedures, and the re-design of assessment criteria to incorporate reproducibility of outputs, knowledge dissemination and transfer.