Open Science – a loosely coupled discourse? Comparing Open Science and Open Innovation from a bibliometric point of view

Abstract

Open Science is currently high on the agenda of science policy officials, funding agencies and scholarly activities. Yet, it is still unclear, how the concept of open science is integrating scholarly debates and as to whether it has established structures similar to other scientific fields or debates. Against this backdrop, we have attempted to study the scholarly discourse of Open Science by using bibliometric and network analysis tools. Our goal was to determine how the open science discourse has evolved over time, how it is structured and how the different associated terms relate to other. In order to evaluate as to whether Open Science has evolved into an established scientific topic, we have attempted to compare OS with another concept which propagates openness in innovation and research, that is, Open Innovation. We found that Open Science and Open Innovation are rising topics within the scholarly discourse. Yet, we have also found that the Open Science keyword network is only sparsely connected internally and the different realms in the Open Science keyword network, such as Open Access, Open Data or Data Sharing are only scarcely connected to each other. Furthermore, we could show that Open Science has so far not developed strong ties to other scholarly debates. We contend that more qualitative and quantitative research is needed in order to understand the scholarly debate of Open Science.