Open science is the movement to make scientific research (including publications, data, physical samples, and software) and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society, amateur or professional.

The primary focus connecting all disciplines is the widespread uptake of new technologies and tools, and the underlying ecology of the production, dissemination and reception of knowledge from a research-based point-of-view.

Open science can be seen as a continuation of, rather than a revolution in, practices begun in the 17th century with the advent of the academic journal, when the societal demand for access to scientific knowledge reached a point at which it became necessary for groups of scientists to share resources[12] with each other.

The examples that the sociologists cite in their paper is that of the Open Science Grid, which enables the development of large-scale projects that require high-volume data management and processing, which is accomplished through a distributed computer network.

De Roure and colleagues (2008)[27] list a series of four key capabilities which they believe define a Social Virtual Research Environment (SVRE): The measurement school, in the view of the authors, deals with developing alternative methods to determine scientific impact.

The gist of the argument for this school is that hidden uses like reading, bookmarking, sharing, discussing and rating are traceable activities, and these traces can and should be used to develop a newer measure of scientific impact.

The pragmatic school considers Open Science as the possibility to make knowledge creation and dissemination more efficient by increasing the collaboration throughout the research process.

[citation needed] These cases are representative of a system of aristocratic patronage in which scientists received funding to develop either immediately useful things or to entertain.

[13][32] In 1665, Henry Oldenburg became the editor of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first academic journal devoted to science, and the foundation for the growth of scientific publishing.

Similarly, this account discusses the publication Time, and its cover story of Carl Sagan in 1980 as propagating the claim that popular science has "turned into enthusiasm".

[39] Chubin's essay cited Robert K. Merton's 1942 proposal of what we now refer to as Mertonian Norms for ideal science practices and scientific modes of communication.

[42] The openness promise by the Internet is then extended to research data, which underpins scientific studies in different disciplines, as mentioned already in the Berlin Declaration in 2003.

In France, the law for a digital Republic enacted in 2016 creates the right to deposit the validated manuscript of a scientific article in an open archive, with an embargo period following the date of publication in the journal.

Michael Eisen, a founder of the Public Library of Science, has described this system by saying that "taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

[51] In October 2021, the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation released an official translation of its second plan for open science spanning the years 2021–2024.

In November 2019, UNESCO was tasked by its 193 Member States, during their 40th General Conference, with leading a global dialogue on Open Science to identify globally-agreed norms and to create a standard-setting instrument.

[55] Two UN frameworks set out some common global standards for application of Open Science and closely related concepts: the UNESCO Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers,[56] approved by the General Conference at its 39th session in 2017, and the UNESCO Strategy on Open Access to scientific information and research,[57] approved by the General Conference at its 36th session in 2011.

[60] An article published by a team of NASA astrobiologists in 2010 in Science reported a bacterium known as GFAJ-1 that could purportedly metabolize arsenic (unlike any previously known species of lifeform).

[64] Researcher Jeff Rouder defined Open Science as "endeavoring to preserve the rights of others to reach independent conclusions about your data and work".

[70] For example, psychologist Stuart Vyse notes that "(r)ecent research aimed at previously published psychology studies has demonstrated – shockingly – that a large number of classic phenomena cannot be reproduced, and the popularity of p-hacking is thought to be one of the culprits.

[82] The typical argument propagates the fact that these type of investigations are too complex to be carried out by any one individual, and therefore, they must rely on a network of open scientists to be accomplished.

[91] Scientists have collaboratively agreed to limit their own fields of inquiry on occasions such as the Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA in 1975,[92]: 111  and a proposed 2015 worldwide moratorium on a human-genome-editing technique.

[95] Post-publication peer review, a staple of open science, has been criticized as promoting the production of lower quality papers that are extremely voluminous.

[97] Common solutions to this problem have been cited as adaptations of a new format in which everything is allowed to be published but a subsequent filter-curator model is imposed to ensure some basic quality of standards are met by all publications.

The Allen Brain Atlas maps gene expression in human and mouse brains; the Encyclopedia of Life documents all the terrestrial species; the Galaxy Zoo classifies galaxies; the International HapMap Project maps the haplotypes of the human genome; the Monarch Initiative makes available integrated public model organism and clinical data; and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which regularizes and publishes data sets from many sources.

[116][117] The ideas of open science have also been applied to recruitment with jobRxiv, a free and international job board that aims to mitigate imbalances in what different labs can afford to spend on hiring.

New statements are constantly developed, such as the Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science to be presented to the Dutch Presidency of the Council of the European Union in late May 2016.

[123] Preprint Servers come in many varieties, but the standard traits across them are stable: they seek to create a quick, free mode of communicating scientific knowledge to the public.

Preprint servers act as a venue to quickly disseminate research and vary on their policies concerning when articles may be submitted relative to journal acceptance.

The founders of SocArXiv further claim that their platform affords the authors the greatest level of flexibility in updating and editing their work to ensure that the latest version is available for rapid dissemination.