The Varying Openness of Digital Open Science Tools | Louise Bezuidenhout and Johanna Havemann | OpenAIRE Preprint, Zenodo, September 3, 2020
This study has analyzed the geolocation, terms and conditions as well as funding models of 242 digital tools increasingly being used by researchers in various disciplines. Its findings indicate that, in their design and restrictions, these tools are biased in favor of developed-country researchers.
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Other than being primarily designed and oriented toward anglophone audiences, digital Open Science tools, as this paper indicates, predominantly originate in the United States (n=135), distantly followed by the European Union (n=41), the United Kingdom (n=26) and other countries (n=20), such as Canada (n=7), Switzerland (n=5), Australia (n=2), Brazil (n=1) and South Africa (n=1). However, even though 99.6% of these tools require funding sources to be financially viable, only relatively limited and similarly-sized shares of these deploy either commercial (23.1%) or institutionally supported (18.2%) business models. In contrast, over half of these digital tools (50.4%) rely for their sustainability on mixed models that combine commercially based viability and grant funding, whereas purely grant-based financing has been found to support only 7.9% of solutions in the Open Science market.