Relations between scientific activity and public policy in the field of open science. The case of Spain

The results show that scientific publications on open science have grown steadily in the last decade, as observed in other previous studies . The countries with the largest published scientific output, such as the United States, China and the United Kingdom, are also the countries with the largest published output about open science. Still, there are other countries, such as Australia, the Netherlands, South Africa and Finland, whose open science activity is intense. This fact coincides with the implementation (since 2011/2012) of European and national policies focused on promoting and consolidating the Open Science movement. In the specific case of Spain, while the country ranks 10th in the world by total production in the Web of Science, it holds position 7 in the field of open science, which evinces the academic community’s interest in the subject in the wake of numerous initiatives also rolled out in the last decade. The topics most closely related to open science were Computer Science and Library and Information Science, since many of the publications analysed technical aspects related to open access to information, the interconnection of different data sources, etc. Although the CSIC was the main producer of publications among Spanish research centres, the Spanish higher education system was responsible for the largest number of documents about open science. In this sense, Overton is a particularly good tool for analysing documents on social science, economics and the environment, disciplines in which it has wide coverage. Fourteen percent of Spanish publications on open science were referenced in policy documents, especially documents put out by government bodies in general and the European Union in particular. Although there is a bias in the source with respect to the representation of policy bodies from North American and European countries, the results seem consistent with reality, since Spanish production is used in publications from the European Union, North America and Latin America and is also an important input for Spanish ministries’ policy documents. At the technical level, one of the limitations encountered was the duplication of results. Exclusion of the duplicates (15%) required manual review. Despite these limitations, this study has served as a starting point for further analysis of the different modes of open science production and communication. We are currently developing new methodologies to retrieve different types of activities related to open science and to measure their impact on social actors