Balancing Open Science and Fair Research Assessment

Balancing Open Science and Fair Research Assessment: The push for Open Science and the reform of research evaluation are colliding, with metrics meant to encourage openness often undermining efforts to move beyond simplistic assessments. This tension highlights the challenge of balancing transparency, accessibility, and collaboration with fair, meaningful evaluation systems.
While Open Science promotes practices like data sharing and Diamond Open Access, new metrics are being introduced to measure adoption and societal impact. However, these metrics risk incentivizing quantity over quality, fostering “metric-driven” behavior instead of meaningful, ethical research practices.
Resolving these challenges is critical for policymakers and initiatives like the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment CoARA and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). The question remains: how can we encourage openness without compromising research quality?

Read more about this in my piece for Research Professional:
Ulrich Herb (2025, Januar 23). Open science has spawned a new wave of metric-driven evaluation—Research Professional News. ResearchProfessional News. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-views-of-europe-2025-1-open-science-has-spawned-a-new-wave-of-metric-driven-evaluation/

At the same time as my article, a text by Mark Huskisson on a related topic was published in Scholarly Kitchen. The author highlights the potential of Open Science to drive societal and economic benefits, though clear causal links remain elusive. Examples like Indonesia demonstrate significant progress in innovation and knowledge sharing through open access and supportive policies.

Mark Huskisson (2025, Januar 23). Guest Post: Reflections from The Munin Conference Part Three – Measuring Impac. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/01/23/guest-post-reflections-from-the-munin-conference-part-three-measuring-impact/

By Ulrich Herb

Graduate sociologist, information scientist (PhD degree), associate of scidecode science consulting – De Castro, Herb, Rothfritz GbR, working for the Saarland University and State Library (Germany)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *