Support for Open Science in EU member states

In preparation for the EU Open Science Conference on April 4-5 in Amsterdam, we looked at what our survey data reveal about declared support for Open Access and Open Science among researchers in the EU.

Support for Open Access and Open Science

Of the 20,663 survey respondents, 10,297 were from the EU, of which 7,358 were researchers (from PhD-students to faculty). Most respondents provided an answer to the two multiple-choice questions on whether or not they support the goals of Open Access and Open Science, respectively. A large majority expressed support for Open Access (87%) and Open Science (79%) (see Fig 1).

Fig. 1 Responses from EU researchers to survey questions on support for Open Access and Open Science

Even though support for Open Science is less than for Open Access, this does not mean that many more people actively state they do NOT support Open Science, as compared to Open Access (see Fig 1). Rather, more people indicate ‘I don’t know’ in answer to the question on Open Science. This could mean they have not yet reached an opinion on Open Science,  that they perhaps support some aspects of Open Science and not others, or simply that they found the wording of the question confusing.

It is interesting to note that the Open Access support figure roughly corresponds with results from Taylor & Francis Open Access surveys of 2013 and 2014, that reported only 16 and 11 percent respectively that agreed with the statement that there are no fundamental benefits to Open Access publication.

Differences between member states

When we look at the differences in professed support for Open Access and Open Science in the various EU member states (see Fig 2, Table 1) we see that support for Open Access is relatively high in many Western European countries. Here, more funding opportunities for Open Access are often available, either through institutional funds or increasingly through negotiations with publishers, where APCs are included in institutional subscriptions for hybrid Open Access journals. Perhaps many researchers in Southern and Eastern member states associate Open Access with either expensive APCs or with “free” or nationally oriented journals they wish to avoid because they are required to publish “international, highly ranked” venues.

Conversely, support for Open Science is higher in many ountries in Southern and Eastern Europe. As pure conjecture, may we state that in these regions, with sometimes less developed research infrastructures, the benefits of Open Science, e.g. for collaboration,  might be more apparant? The observed outliers to this general pattern (e.g. Belgium and Italy) illustrate both the limitations of these survey data (number of responses and possible bias) and the fact that the whole picture is likely to be more complicated.

Fig. 2 Level of support for Open Access (left panel) and Open Science (right panel) in individual EU member states. Scale is based on non-weighted country averages. Results for states with less than 20 individual responses are omitted (see Table 1).

In general, the above differences between member states come into even clearer focus when support for Open Science is compared to that for Open Access, for each country. Fig 3 shows whether support for Open Science in a given country is higher or lower than for Open Access. Again, in most Western European countries Open Access is easily embraced while Open Science, perhaps because it is going further and being a more recent development, meets more doubt or even resistance. In many Southern and Eastern European countries, the pattern is reversed.  Clearly though, this cannot be the full story. Finding out what is behind these differences may valuably inform discussions on how to proceed with Open Access/Open Science policies and implementation.

Fig. 3 Ratio of support for Open Science (OS) and Open Access (OA) in individual EU member states (red = relatively more support for OA than for OS, green = relatively more support for OS than OA). Scale is based non-weighted country ratios. Results for states with less than 20 individual responses were omitted (see Table 1).

Irrespective of differences between countries, the overall big majority support of Open Access as well as Open Science among European researchers is perhaps the most striking result. Of course, support not automatically implies that one puts ideas into practice. For this, it will be interesting to look at the actual research workflows of the researchers that took our survey, to see in how far their practices align with their stated support for Open Access and Open Science. Also, since our survey used a self-selected sample (though distribution was very broad), care should be taken in interpretation of the results, as they might be influenced by self-selection bias.

Data

The aggregated data underlying this post are shown in Table 1. For this analysis, we did not yet look at differences between scientific disciplines or career stage. Full (anonymized) data on this and all other survey questions will be made public on April 15th.

	Do you support the goal of Open Access?					Do you support the goals of Open Science?
	Yes	No	I don’t know	# responses		Yes	No	I don’t know	# responses
Austria	95%	2%	3%	60		83%	3%	14%	66
Belgium	89%	5%	6%	103		88%	3%	9%	102
Bulgaria	81%	14%	5%	21		72%	0%	28%	18
Croatia	85%	12%	3%	33		94%	0%	6%	31
Cyprus	69%	8%	23%	13		69%	8%	23%	13
Czech Republic	73%	13%	13%	75		69%	13%	18%	78
Denmark	90%	1%	9%	80		84%	0%	16%	82
Estonia	85%	8%	8%	13		92%	8%	0%	13
Finland	84%	4%	12%	92		83%	3%	14%	95
France	87%	5%	8%	686		79%	5%	16%	699
Germany	87%	3%	9%	1165		76%	7%	18%	1179
Greece	81%	7%	12%	214		85%	4%	12%	222
Hungary	89%	9%	2%	45		83%	10%	7%	41
Ireland	81%	5%	15%	62		82%	5%	13%	62
Italy	79%	7%	14%	407		77%	4%	18%	413
Latvia	86%	0%	14%	7		83%	0%	17%	6
Lithuania	88%	0%	13%	8		75%	13%	13%	8
Luxembourg	86%	0%	14%	7		57%	0%	43%	7
Malta	100%	0%	0%	8		75%	0%	25%	8
Netherlands	89%	2%	9%	1610		75%	5%	20%	1627
Poland	86%	7%	7%	85		88%	5%	7%	83
Portugal	88%	5%	8%	129		84%	5%	11%	133
Romania	80%	5%	15%	82		85%	5%	10%	82
Slovakia	70%	5%	25%	20		82%	6%	12%	17
Slovenia	96%	0%	4%	27		96%	0%	4%	28
Spain	87%	3%	10%	537		88%	2%	10%	542
Sweden	90%	3%	6%	146		76%	6%	19%	145
United Kingdom	88%	3%	9%	1113		79%	4%	17%	1123
Total	87%	4%	9%	6848		79%	5%	17%	6923

Table 1 Aggregated data on support of Open Access and Open Science per EU member state.