The open science movement has expanded the uses of scientific output beyond specialized academic circles. Open science enables broader communities to learn from each other and informs practice and learning across diverse fields.
The non-academic audience for journals and other scientific outputs has always been significant but has not been captured by the leading metrics of scientific reception, which favor citation data. In the late 1990s, the first open-access online publications began to attract a large number of visitors. This transformation renewed the theories of scientific dissemination, as direct access to publications curtailed the classic model of scientific popularization. The social impact and potential uses by lay readers have become focal points of discussion in the development of open science platforms and infrastructures.
Analysis of open science use has required the development of new methods, including log analysis, crosslinking analysis, or altmetrics, as the standard bibliometric approach failed to record the non-academic reception of scientific outputs.
In the 2010s, many detailed studies focused on the reception of specific open science platforms due to the increasing availability of user data. Log analysis and surveys showed that professional academics do not constitute the majority of the audience, as recurring readers include students, non-academic professionals (policy makers, industrial research and development, knowledge workers), and "private citizens" with various motivations. Traffic on open science platforms is driven by a broader ecosystem of knowledge sharing and popularization, including non-academic outputs such as blogs. Non-academic audiences tend to prefer the use of local language, which has created new incentives for linguistic diversity in science.
Concepts and definition
Bibliometrics and its limitations After the Second World War, the reception of scientific publications has been increasingly measured by quantitative counts of citations. The field of bibliometrics coalesced in parallel to the development of the first computerized search engine, the Science Citation Index, originally established by Eugene Garfield in 1962. Founding figures of the field, like the British historian of science Derek John de Solla Price, were proponents of bibliometric reductionism, i.e., the reduction of all possible bibliometric indicators to citation data and citation graphs. Bibliometric indicators, like the Impact Factor, have had a significant influence over research policy and research evaluation since the 1970s.
Academic search engine, citation data collection, and the related metrics were intentionally designed to favor English-speaking journals. Until the development of open science platforms, "very little [was] actually known about the impact of Latin American journals overall". The use of standard bibliometric indicators like the impact factor yielded a very limited outlook on the breadth and diversity of the academic publishing ecosystem in this region and other non-Western areas: "Putting aside issues of equity, the underrepresentation and shear low number of journals from developing countries mean that journals that are geared towards the developing world will have less of its citations counted than one geared towards journals that are in the dataset."
In its early developments, the open science movement partly coopted the standard tools of bibliometrics and quantitative evaluation: "the fact that no reference was made to metadata in the main OA declarations (Budapest, Berlin, Bethesda) has led to a paradoxical situation (…) it was through the use of the Web of Science that OA advocates were eager to show how much accessibility led to a citation advantage compared to paywalled articles." After 2000, an important bibliometric literature was devoted to the citation advantage of open access publications.
By the end of the 2000s, the impact factor and other metrics had been increasingly held responsible for a systemic lock-in of prestigious non-accessible sources. Key figures of the open science movement, such as Stevan Harnad, called for the creation of "open access scientometrics" that would take "advantage of the wealth of usage and impact metrics enabled by the multiplication of online, full-text, open access digital archives." As the public of open science expanded beyond academic circles, new metrics should aim for "measuring the broader societal impacts of scientific research."
Non-academic audience Academic journals have always had a significant non-academic audience, be they students, professionals, or amateurs. In 2000, one-third of these readers had never authored a scientific publication. This rate may be higher for social science journals, which may also act as intellectual periodicals. During the second half of the 20th century, the , along with the increasing prevalence of high school education: "the percentage of U.S. adults with a minimal level of understanding of the meaning of scientific study has increased from 12 percent in 1957 to 21 percent in 1999".
The prevalence of non-academic audience raises additional issues on the relevance and scope of classic bibliometric measures, as they would "never appear in citation data". The infrastructures and business models put in place by leading scientific publishers do not consider non-academic uses. Following the periodical crisis of the 1980s and the inflation of subscription prices, major journals have largely become unattainable for lay readers or independent researchers not affiliated with a large research institution. Search engines and bibliographic databases developed since the 1960s and the 1970s were meant to be used by professional librarians. Leading scientific publishers tacitly rely on a "gap" model of scientific reception, where specialized scientific knowledge is not directly accessible but mediated and popularized.
The shift of academic journals to electronic publishing and open access has underlined the significant discrepancy between the measures of citation counts. By the late 1990s, online journals and archive repositories had evidently attracted a very large audience: "Within individual disciplines, the change has been nearly instantaneous. As an example, in mid-1997 the number of papers downloaded from astronomy's digital library, the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS; ads.harvard.edu) exceeded the sum of all the papers read in all of astronomy's print libraries". Log studies have regularly underlined that publication of open access has a much higher rate of use and downloading than publications behind a paywall.
The enlargement of the audience of scientific work to non-academic has always been a key objective of the open access movement: "even the earliest formulations of the concept of open access included the general public as a potential audience for open access". The Budapest Open Access Initiative of 2001 includes among the beneficiaries of open access "scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds".
In an open science context, a non-academic audience has been associated with a wider figure: the lay reader or unexpected reader. Once universally accessible, an academic work can have unplanned readers or users.The Unexpected reader In 2006, John Willinsky theorized that "it is not difficult to imagine occasions when a dedicated history teacher, an especially keen high school student, an amateur astronomer, or an ecologically concerned citizen might welcome the opportunity to browse the current and relevant literature about their interests." Unexpected forms of reception did happen as the Editor in chief of PLOS once received a promising research on the modelling of pandemics, which turned out to be written by "a fifteen-year old high school student". The lay reader is not necessarily part of a non-academic audience, as a professional scientist may become one if "the information sought is outside his or her area of expertise". Not all unexpected readers behave similarly or have the same capacity for using academic resources. Even where they are not dealing with their main domain of expertise, academic researchers or some professionals (the knowledge workers) have acquired some generic skills for bibliographic analysis, such as following citations in the literature.
Unanticipated academic uses Paywalled journals did not satisfy a larger range of unanticipated academic uses, as the costs of subscription access have been conditioned on the field of work or the available resources at the institutional level. In 2011, Michael Carroll introduced a typology of five "unanticipated readers" which are beyond the scope of the reading expectations of online academic journals: serendipitous readers (who discover the publication through complex reading paths), the under-resourced readers (presumably uninitiated, like high school students) interdisciplinary readers (scientists that belong to a different field) international readers (scientist that work within a different national frame) and machine readers (bots that retrieve a corpus, for instance as part of a text mining project).
The development of academic pirate platforms like Sci-Hub or Libgen highlighted structural inequalities on a global scale: "The geography of Sci-Hub usage generally looks like a map of scientific productivity, but with some of the richer and poorer science-focused nations flipped." High rates of sci-hub use have been especially found in Russia, Algeria, Brazil, Turkey, Mexico, and India, which are all countries with significant local academic productions despite having fewer resources than OECD countries: "relatively to their national scientific production, middle-income countries had the more intensive use of pirated academic works". The audience of pirate academic platforms remains significant even in North American and European universities endowed with large library subscriptions, as access is commonly perceived as more straightforward than in paywalled libraries: "even for journals to which the university has access, Sci-Hub is becoming the go-to resource".
From impact factor to social impact The development of large open science platforms and infrastructure after 2010 entailed a shift in the measurement of scientific impact, from a strong focus on highly quoted English-speaking journals to an expanded analysis of the social circulation of scientific publications. This transformation has been especially noticeable in Latin America, due to the early development of public-funded international publishing platforms like Redalyc, or Scielo: "There is a definite sense in Latin America that the investment in science will result in development in a more broadly defined sense—beyond simply innovation and economic growth."
In 2015, Juan Pablo Alperin introduced a systematic measure of social impact by relying on a diverse set of indicators (log analysis, surveys, and alternative metrics). This approach entailed a conceptual redefinition of key concepts of scientific reception, such as impact, reach or reader:
The unprecedented focus on the social impact of science fits with alternative models of scientific popularization. In 2009, Alesia Zuccala introduced a radiant model of open science dissemination with a variety of mediated and unmediated connections between non-academic audience and academic production: "Sometimes [research] engages the lay public—this is the co-production model of science communication—and sometimes self-selected intermediaries tell members of the public what they should know—the education model of science communication".
Methods