Episode 12.6: Types of Open Practices II: Open Access & Preprints, Open Educational Resources, Open Evaluation, Team Science, Open Source Software
Last updated on 2026-10-04 | Edit this page
Overview
Questions
- Once a study is finished, what does it mean for it to be genuinely open to the public?
- How is openness relevant to teaching, peer review, collaboration, and software, not just data?
- How do these practices work together in a single project?
Objectives
Learners will be able to:
- Distinguish open access from preprints, and explain when each applies.
- Describe what open evaluation changes about peer review.
- Explain how team science and open source software extend open science principles beyond data and papers.
- Identify which of these practices best fits a given research scenario.
Think Like a Researcher
The vaccine hesitancy team from the last episode has finished their study: preregistered hypothesis, FAIR-compliant open data, code shared publicly. It’s a strong, credible piece of research.
But now a new set of questions shows up. Who can actually read the finished paper: only people at institutions that pay for expensive journal subscriptions, or anyone? Was the review that approved it done entirely behind closed doors, or can others see how it was judged? Did the team collaborate with health workers in the community they studied, or work entirely on their own? And the statistical software they used to analyse everything: is it something the whole scientific community can inspect, or a closed tool nobody outside the company can look inside?
Being open about data and hypotheses is only part of the picture. This episode covers the rest.
Open Access and Preprints
Open Acces: This means the final, published, peer-reviewed paper can be read by anyone, free of charge, not locked behind a journal subscription. Some open-access journals charge the authors a publishing fee instead of charging readers; others are free to both.
Preprints: A preprint is a version of a paper shared publicly (often on a dedicated server) before or during formal peer review. It gets findings into circulation months, sometimes years, faster than the traditional review-and-publish cycle allows.
The two are related but not the same. A preprint is not yet formally peer-reviewed; open access is usually about the final, reviewed version. A paper can be a preprint without being open access later, or open access without ever having existed as a preprint. Increasingly, teams do both: post early as a preprint, then publish the peer-reviewed version somewhere freely accessible too.
Example: The vaccine hesitancy team posts a preprint the day they finish their analysis, so health workers can start using the findings immediately, then publishes the peer-reviewed version six months later in an open-access journal.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER extends the same logic to teaching. Course materials (lecture notes,
textbooks, problem sets, training modules) are released under licences
that let others use, adapt, and redistribute them, rather than
restricting them to a single classroom or paying customer base.
Example: A university’s introductory statistics course releases its full set of lecture slides and datasets under an open licence. A lecturer at a different, less-resourced institution adapts them for their own students instead of building a course from scratch. (Another good example is this course!)
Open Evaluation
Traditional peer review happens almost entirely out of sight: reviewers
are usually anonymous, and their comments are seen only by the editor
and authors. Open evaluation makes some or all of that process visible:
publishing reviewer reports alongside the paper, naming reviewers, or
opening a paper up to public comment before or after publication.
Example: When the vaccine hesitancy paper is reviewed, the journal publishes the reviewers’ comments and the authors’ responses alongside the final paper, so readers can see exactly what concerns were raised and how they were addressed.
Team Science and Open Collaboration
Some research questions are too large, or too context-dependent, for a
single team to answer well alone. Team science structures a project so
that many groups (sometimes across countries) contribute data or
expertise under a shared, transparent plan, with clear rules about how
contribution and authorship are credited.
Example: Instead of studying vaccine hesitancy in one town, a consortium of researchers across a dozen countries runs the same preregistered protocol simultaneously, pooling their data to see which findings hold across very different contexts, and which are specific to one place.
Open Source Software
This applies the same transparency principle to the tools research
depends on. When the software used to collect or analyse data is open
source, its underlying code can be inspected by anyone, which means bugs
or errors in the tool itself can be found, reported, and fixed, not just
trusted on faith.
Example: The vaccine hesitancy team runs their analysis using an openly maintained statistical package rather than a closed, proprietary one. When another researcher spots a bug in one of the functions they used, they can report it, see it fixed, and know that the same fix benefits everyone else using that tool.
How Do These Fit Together?
None of these five practices depends on the others, but a fully open
project tends to use several at once: a preprint gets findings out
quickly, an open-access publication keeps them permanently accessible,
open evaluation shows how the work was judged, team science broadens who
gets to contribute, and open source tools mean the software behind the
analysis is just as inspectable as the data it produced.
Test Your Knowledge!
Challenge 1:
A paper is shared on a public server the same week it’s submitted to a journal, well before formal peer review has finished. What is this called?
A. Open access
B. A preprint
C. Open evaluation
D. Open source
A preprint: a version shared publicly before or during formal review. It becomes open access (if the venue is open access) once the peer-reviewed version is published.
Challenge 2:
True or False: A study can be a preprint and never become open access.
True. If the eventual peer-reviewed version is published somewhere behind a paywall, the paper existed as a freely available preprint at one stage but isn’t open access afterward.
Challenge 3:
A journal publishes reviewers’ full comments and the authors’ responses alongside every accepted paper. Which practice does this describe?
A. Team science
B. Open evaluation
C. Open educational resources
D. Preregistration
B. Open evaluation: making the review and judgment process itself visible, rather than something that happens entirely behind closed doors.
Challenge 4:
Which practice from this episode is most directly about the tools researchers use to collect or analyse data, rather than the research findings themselves?
Open source software: it’s about whether the underlying code of the tools themselves can be inspected and improved by anyone, separate from whatever data or results those tools are used to produce.
- Open access means the final paper is freely readable; a preprint is an early version shared before or during formal peer review. Related, but not the same thing.
- Open Educational Resources extend openness to teaching materials, letting others reuse and adapt them.
- Open evaluation makes some or all of the peer review process visible, rather than keeping it entirely behind closed doors.
- Team science broadens who can contribute to a study, often across institutions or countries, with transparent rules about credit.
- Open source software applies the same transparency to research tools, so errors in the tools themselves can be found and fixed by anyone. A fully open project typically combines several of these practices rather than relying on just one.
To-do: Add infographic: a paper’s life cycle.
💡 None of these practices are “all or nothing” badges. A project can post a preprint without doing open evaluation, or use open source tools without being part of a large team-science consortium. Openness is a set of independent choices, not a single checkbox.