What Drives Open Science Pioneers? Evidence from Open Science Award Winners

New academic practices discussed under the term Open Science are receiving increasing attention. However, after more than two decades of experimentation with new forms of openness in science, broadly effective anchoring in scientific practice remains pending (Mendez et al., 2020). This leads to the overarching question of how it can be explained that the new possibilities of digital technologies combined with the stringently presented and generally comprehensible science policy rationale for Open Science have so far only hesitantly translated into changed scientific practices on a broad scale.

This is also related to the question of why individual scientists and scientific communities have continued to implement Open Science practices – what drives them to do so and what tensions come into play while opening up their scientific knowledge production and dissemination? For a better understanding of scientists’ motives for engaging in Open Science practices, this talk presents the findings of an empirical study concentrating on scientists who actively anchor Open Science.

The qualitative analysis builds on 13 in-depth interviews with Open Science award winners in Germany. Based on methodological triangulation, narrative interviews in combination with visual forms of hierarchical value maps, the findings outline a holistic spectrum of open science motives. The resulting motive wheel with individual, scientific and societal benefits of Open Science offers diverse future perspectives for science on science and science policy to contribute to the path towards a further “full and fair implementation” (Frank et al., 2023) of Open Science on the basis of a deeper empirical understanding.