July 17, 2024 | News | Video

Sharing is Caring – Open science in demographic research

Open Science addresses concerns about the reliability of scientific research and is gaining traction in various fields. Ugofilippo Basellini's paper reviews the state of openness in demographic research and finds significant progress in open access, but less so in the availability of open software code. The study emphasizes the importance of sharing software code to advance the field and proposes recommendations to encourage this practice. Basellini advocates for a culture of openness, emphasizing the need for supportive feedback, incentives, and training to encourage code sharing.

Click here for Youtube video with subtitles.

In response to growing concerns about the reliability of scientific research, Open Science has gained significant momentum across various sectors, including academia, business, intergovernmental organizations, the media, and the public. Ugofilippo Basellini is a research scientist and Deputy Head of the Laboratory of Population Dynamics and Sustainable Well-being at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. In his current paper he sheds light on the current state of openness in demographic research, revealing both progress and areas needing improvement.

The study analyzed all relevant publications from the past decade in four leading demographic journals: Demography, Population and Development Review, Population Studies, and Demographic Research. Utilizing a text-search algorithm, Basellini estimated two key metrics of open scientific knowledge: the proportion of openly accessible publications and the share of publications providing open software codes for reproducibility.

His findings show a substantial increase in the accessibility of demographic research papers, with over 90% of publications available as open access by 2023. However, the availability of open software codes remains low, showing minimal improvement. While Demographic Research leads with an average of 31% of articles providing these software codes, the other journals lag significantly behind, averaging only about 12%.

This study marks the first comprehensive assessment of open science practices in demographic research over the last decade and highlights the need for greater efforts in sharing software codes and data to advance the field. The authors propose several recommendations to foster this essential change.

Interview with Ugofilippo Basellini on Open Science

(Transcript from the video)

How would you explain Open science?
Open Science means different things to different people. For some, it is the open, free accessibility of scientific research. For others, it is the public provision of data and software codes. And for still others, it concerns the participation of non-scientists into the scientific process. Acknowledging the need for a common definition the UNESCO, in 2021, adopted the first internationally agreed definition of Open Science, that is a set of principles and practices that aim to make multilingual scientific knowledge accessible and reusable for everyone, for the benefit of science and society.

Why do you think it is important to share knowledge?
I think that the more knowledge can circulates, the more opportunities there are for people to learn about this knowledge, to use it and also contribute to its development. Unfortunately, today, much scientific knowledge is still only available in exchange for a payment. This is a real barrier to the dissemination of knowledge, especially for people in less-advantaged countries and institutions, and this increases inequalities and is detrimental to scientific progress.

What exactly did you look at in your paper?
As a demographer, I was very interested to examine two things. So first, I was curious to know how accessible and how freely open demographic research really is. Second, I was curious to know how open the building blocks of our discipline are. In particular, demographers spend a lot of time analysing demographic data, and the software codes developed for this purpose are a really important scientific output. In fact, these codes allow other researchers to verify, replicate and generalize published results, contributing to the development of the discipline. So, for this reason, I was also curious to look how accessible, how open these software codes are.

How did you do it?
I downloaded about 3,000 papers that have been published in four leading journals of demography over the last decade. And then, I developed a text-search algorithm that, for each of this paper, allowed me to determine whether the paper was Open Access which means, freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and second whether the authors of the paper had made publicly available the software codes that they had developed for their analyses.

What were your findings?
So, analysing these two indicators of open scientific knowledge over time, I found two contrasting patterns. On the one hand, the publication of demographic research is becoming more and more accessible to everyone, with more than 90% papers published Open Access in 2023. On the other hand, the provision of software codes has always been and still remains very little, ranging from 10 to 30% in 2023 in different journals and importantly there have been very little signs of improvement over time of this trend.

So, how open is science in demography and what do you think needs to improve?
I think that while we are moving in the right direction in terms of publishing openly, we as a field could do a better job and put more efforts into sharing more our software codes. This would be very beneficial for other researchers, but also to allow a faster development of our discipline. Often sharing of code does not occur because of a lack of confidence or a lack of incentives or the fear of being scrutinized. I think we should try to change this narrative, for example, by providing more encouraging and more supportive feedback and comments to those who decide to share their code and work by providing more opportunities for training, especially for early-career researchers; by providing more incentives for sharing codes and finally, by trying to develop a culture where sharing becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sharing is caring, and I think we can all do our little part in this process.

Original Publication

Basellini, Ugofilippo: "Open science practices in demographic research: an appraisal" in Demographic Research (2024).
DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2024.50.43