Episode 12.1: Introduction to Open Science: What Is It, and Why Does It Matter?
Last updated on 2026-09-08 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- What is open science, and how is it different from just “publishing
research”?
- What are the core ideas holding the open science movement
together?
- Why should every researcher — not only experienced scientists — care about it?
Objectives
Learners will be able to:
- Define open science (also called open research or open scholarship) in their own words.
- Identify the three core ideas behind open science: transparent processes, collaboration and reuse, and accessible knowledge.
- Explain why openness matters for the trustworthiness of research, using a real research example.
- Recognise that open science does not mean sharing everything, regardless of ethics.
Think Like a Researcher
A few months after Aisha’s malaria study wraps up, an email arrives from a researcher at another university:
“Hello Aisha — I read about your malaria project, and we’d like to run something similar in another community. Would it be possible to use your questionnaire, and learn how you analysed your results?”
Aisha is delighted. Then she starts looking.
She never saved a final, clean version of the questionnaire — just several edited drafts. Her notebook has her observations, but no explanation of how she scored each household’s sanitation level. Her nephew analysed the numbers in Excel, but the formulas were never labelled, and he cleared the original file months ago while freeing up space on his laptop.
Aisha remembers roughly what she did. She just can’t fully show it. The second team will have to start almost from scratch.
If good research is supposed to help others learn from and build on it, shouldn’t researchers make that as easy as possible? That question sits at the centre of open science.
A Wise Scholar Once Said…
““Nullius in verba” which means take nobody’s word for it. It has been the motto of the Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest scientific academies, since the 1660s. Long before anyone used the phrase “open science,” this was already the underlying idea: a claim only counts as knowledge once it can be checked.”
Isn’t Research Already Open?
It might seem like it should be. Papers are published every day; universities produce thousands of them a year. So what’s missing? Picture a chef who wins a cooking competition. You see a photo of the winning dish (and you’re told it’s delicious!), but the chef won’t share the recipe, the exact ingredients, or the method. Could you recreate it? Almost certainly not. Now picture a chef who shares everything: the recipe, the exact quantities, even the mistakes made along the way. Thousands of people can now recreate the dish — and some will improve it. Publishing a paper’s conclusions is the first chef. Sharing the plan, the data, and the reasoning behind the conclusions is the second. Most published research still looks a lot more like the first.
What Is Open Science, Really?
Open science (sometimes called open scholarship or open research) is an umbrella term. Different fields and institutions define it slightly differently, but they all circle back to the same idea: Open science is the practice of making the process of research — not just the finished paper — visible and available, so that other people can check it, use it, and build on it.
Traditionally, the public only ever sees the last 10% of a research project: a polished paper, sitting behind a journal’s paywall, describing results without showing the raw data, the false starts, or the exact steps that produced them. Open science tries to open up the other 90% — the plans, the materials, the data, the code, the review process, where ethical — so that research can be verified rather than just taken on faith. And it applies across the whole research lifecycle: planning, doing the work, publishing and not just the moment a paper comes out.
Key Pillars of Open Science
Transparency: Explaining how a result was reached. Including how participants were selected, how something was measured, why a particular test was used. This is what lets someone else spot an honest mistake before it spreads.
Collaboration and Reuse: No one researcher has every skill a question needs. Sharing methods, data, and tools lets a statistician, a lab specialist, and a community expert build on the same foundation instead of working in isolation. If teams in several countries investigate a question like Aisha’s using comparable, shared methods, each study adds to a much bigger picture than any one of them could produce alone.
Accessible Knowledge: A finding only helps the people who can actually reach it. A rural clinic without a journal subscription, a policymaker, or a student writing their first proposal. Accessibility is what decides whether they ever see it at all. This covers more than papers; it includes the teaching materials and tools that let people participate in research to begin with (like Pre-seeds!).
Not the Same as “Share Everything”
This is where people often get open science wrong. It does not mean uploading every file, spreadsheet, or participant record. Ethics comes first, always — identifiable medical records, confidential therapy notes, and culturally sensitive information from a community all stay protected, regardless of how “open” the rest of a project is. Open science means sharing as much as is genuinely useful and appropriate, not everything that exists.
Why Does Open Science Matter?
Open science isn’t just a courtesy extended to other researchers. It affects how much weight research can carry in the real world. In health and medicine: It lets other scientists verify that a treatment or intervention really works before it’s scaled up to entire populations. In policy-making: It gives decision-makers a way to check the evidence behind a recommendation, instead of taking a summary on faith. In education and training: It means students and early-career researchers can learn from real data and real materials, not just a tidy final narrative. In everyday trust in science: When findings can be checked and often don’t hold up, it damages public confidence in research generally as openness is part of how that trust gets rebuilt.
Reflection
Think of a project you finished a while ago. If someone asked you today to explain exactly how you reached your conclusion, could you? Would your notes, files, and reasoning still make sense to you, let alone to someone else?
Wrap-Up: Open Science as a Way of Doing Research
To practise open science is to say: “Show your work, so it can be trusted and built on.” Not necessarily because anyone assumes researchers are dishonest, but because a result nobody can check is a result nobody can fully rely on. In the next episode, we’ll look at exactly why this became such an urgent conversation across so many fields at once.
Test Your Knowledge!
Challenge 1:
Open science is mainly about making the final paper free to read.
False. Free access is one piece of it (you’ll meet it properly in Episode 2.6), but open science is the broader practice of opening up the whole research process — plans, data, materials, and reasoning — not just the finished write-up.
Challenge 2:
Which of these best captures what open science means?
- A. Research conducted without any oversight
- B. Making research more transparent, collaborative, and accessible
- C. Publishing only the findings that turned out well
- D. Sharing participant records publicly, regardless of consent
B. The other three options actually work against good, ethical research rather than supporting it.
Challenge 3:
Which of the following would NOT count as an open science practice?
- A. Sharing a documented protocol so someone else could repeat a study
- B. Clearly labelling and organising a dataset before archiving it
- C. Withholding a method deliberately so others can’t reuse it
- D. Making teaching materials available under an open licence
C. Deliberately withholding a method runs directly against openness. Everything else on the list supports it.
Figures
To-do: Add infographic - “The Pillars of Open Science”.
💡 Open science is not all-or-nothing. A study can be more or less open depending on which practices it adopts. You’ll see the full range of practices in the next few episodes.
- Open science is the practice of making the process of research — plans, data, materials, and code — visible and available.
- Its three core pillars are transparent processes, collaboration and reuse, and accessible knowledge.
- Openness applies throughout the research lifecycle, not only at the point of publication.
- Open science is not “share everything” , ethical and legal protections around sensitive information always come first.