Awareness and Use of Open Research Practices: An International Survey of Researchers Across Disciplines

Abstract

Background: Growing concerns about replicability, reproducibility, and transparency have led to the adoption of several open research practices aimed at reforming the academic ecosystem. The current study explores international researcher’s awareness and use of open research practice and variations across regions, disciplines, methodologies, and career level. Methods: A total of 3,017 researchers (45 countries; 24 disciplines) completed the Brief Open Research Survey, reporting their awareness and use of eleven common open research practices and factors that would support their adoption. Results: Respondents reported high awareness of Open Access Publishing, Preprints, and Open Data and awareness only fell below 50% for Research Co-production and Registered Reports. Use was high for Open Access Publishing, but fell below 50% for Preprints, Open Data, Open Research [term], Open Materials, Open Peer Review, Open Code, Preregistration, Research Co-production, Replication, and Registered Reports. Awareness and use varied across the sampled regions (e.g., Europe vs. Asia), disciplines (e.g., Psychology vs. General & Others in Sciences), methodologies (e.g., quantitative vs. qualitative), and career stages (e.g., PhD students vs. Professors). Respondents reported that the top five supportive strategies of open research were incentives from funders, institutions and regulators; dedicated funding; recognition in promotion and recruitment criteria; more training; and more information. Conclusions: Awareness is uniformly higher than use across open research practices and there are important variations between regions, methodologies, and career stages, as well as discipline-specific practices. [source: preprint version at OSF: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/edzxf_v1].