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Scholarly Communication

How open science helps researchers succeed

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A new peer-reviewed, sweeping assessment of the impact of open science discovers a number of heartening trends and outcomes in open access approaches to research scholarship. The authors look carefully at the past decade of published research on the impact of open access policies and “find significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices.”

As they write in summary,

The evidence that openly sharing articles, code, and data is beneficial for researchers is strong and building. Each year, more studies are published showing the open citation advantage; more funders announce policies encouraging, mandating, or specifically financing open research; and more employers are recognizing open practices in academic evaluations. In addition, a growing number of tools are making the process of sharing research outputs easier, faster, and more cost-effective. In his 2012 book Open Access, Peter Suber summed it up best: “[OA] increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But…it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming.” (Suber, 2012)

McKiernan et al. “How open science helps researchers succeed.” eLife 2016;5:e16800. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.16800 

The article’s bibliography of past studies is alone worth a look. The full article is available in full text form at elifesciences.org by clicking on the DOI in the article citation above.

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