The Open Scholarship Survey

About the Open Scholarship Survey

The Open Scholarship Survey (OSS) is a standard, modular survey that assesses researcher norms about open scholarship practices, blockers to adoption of open scholarship, and researchers’ perceptions about their fields and the credibility of the literature. Insights from OSS data direct attention to:

  • Which open scholarship practices in a community are most ripe for advancement by identifying attitude/behavior gaps, where adoption of a practice lags behind the community’s support for it.

  • Attitude/perception gaps, where researchers may be underestimating the support for a practice in their community.

  • Key blockers to open scholarship adoption, which could be addressed by more targeted training, better incentives, or more awareness of a community’s norms.

Access the OSS

Key features:

  • Widely applicable: Items designed for assessment across research disciplines, regions, professions, and career-stage
  • Standards-based: See how your community compares with peer communities
  • Modular: Examine the topics and activities most relevant to you or your community
  • Customizable: Add custom measures to maximize relevance and impact of assessment
  • Open: OSS is openly-licensed to maximize reuse and impact

Topics include:

  • Sharing data, materials, and code
  • Preregistration
  • Preprints and Open Access
  • Replication, Reproduction, and Robustness
  • Reporting null results
  • Perceived criteria for hiring, promotion, grants, and awards
  • And more…

Assessed activities include:

  • Attitudes: Do researchers support this open scholarship behavior?
  • Behaviors: Are researchers doing this behavior?
  • Perceived norms: Do researchers perceive that their community supports this behavior?
  • Incentives: Do researchers perceive rewards or punishments for adopting open scholarship practices?
  • Motivations and barriers to change: What are researchers' concerns and motivations for adopting the behavior?

Why Use the OSS?

Assess community
Assess the attitudes, norms, behaviors, and incentives about open scholarship of researchers in your community.
Identify areas of opportunity
Identify areas of opportunity and challenge for planning initiatives to promote rigor, transparency, and reproducibility.
Monitor changing beliefs
Monitor changing beliefs and practices about open scholarship.

See Some Examples!

Preprints and open access

Preprints and open access

10 minutes
Emphasis on institutional incentives

Institutional incentives for open scholarship

10 minutes
Overview of sharing data, code, and materials

Open data, code, and materials

15 minutes

Want to Learn More?