New Year, new dataset

The latest quarterly update to the Open Science Indicators (OSIs) dataset was released in December, marking the one year anniversary of OSIs. This release includes data for more than 29,000 additional articles, and incorporates key improvements to the OSI algorithm and dataset.

New to the December 2023 OSI dataset

OSIs are a living dataset, part of an ongoing research project with an evolving process, and we are sharing as we go—just as we ask researchers to do. With each new release, we refine, improve, and expand. Here’s what’s new in the most recent quarterly update.

• In addition to data from the most recent quarter, articles published in 2018 have been added to the latest release, for coverage from January 1, 2018 to September 30, 2023 (5 years, 9 months). So far, this data has been analyzed for the three original indicators only: data sharing, code sharing, and preprints.

• We’ve integrated Dimensions Fields of Research categories, so that the data is more easily segmented by research discipline.

• Improvements to the algorithm have been applied to the entire corpus in this release. The new approach is more efficient. Manual steps have been eliminated, and the process moved to an external cloud server. It also removes a source of false positives whereby some articles were incorrectly identified as code-generating. As a result, in the PLOS cohort, code generation has fallen by about 15%, and the percentage of articles sharing code as a function of eligible articles has increased.

Q3 2023 progress

With the addition of 2018 data, we can observe an acceleration in preprint adoption among PLOS authors between 2018 and 2019, likely driven by PLOS’s integration with bioRxiv in 2018. 

Similarly, while the preprint rate overall held steady at 25%, the Q3 2023 results show a large relative increase of PLOS articles with preprints on EarthArXiv, following the integration with PLOS Climate, PLOS Water, and PLOS Sustainability & Transformation in January 2023.

The rate of data repository use reached a new high of 30% in Q3. The rate of code sharing out of all articles published was 17%, a 1% increase from Q2 and an all-time high. Code sharing out of eligible articles only was 42%.

Anticipating the March 2024 OSI update

The March OSI dataset will present data from the whole of 2023, tracking six full years of progress. Looking ahead, we’ll be working with UKRN on their open research indicators, and anticipate introducing a fifth indicator later in 2024. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions, and are especially interested in hearing about how you have applied OSI data in your work, and what additional data points you would find useful.

A note on Comparator data

We’ve identified inconsistencies within the makeup of the Comparator sample for Q3 23, which make it less representative of the corpus than the rest of the Comparator data. We will address this in the next release, with a reconfiguration of the Comparator sample for the quarter.