Open science supports future research
By making data, code, and protocols open, researchers can eliminate barriers to future work and build on a previous study's findings
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is writing a series of articles as part of their Future of Open Science series. Here, they regularly releases posts that explore topics such as open access and open science. In December 2019, they released a post titled "Building the foundation for future research through Open data, code and protocols". In this post, they observe that scientific publications making data, code, and protocols appropriately accessible to the public can lead to reproducible results. One example of a study that exemplifies this phenomenon is a paper titled "An empirical analysis of journal policy effectiveness for computation reproducibility". In addition, they found that researchers have reported that the availability of open data has played an important role in their work. In the 2019 State of Open Data researcher survey, more than 70% of respondents reported that they are likely to re-use open datasets in their future research and some even rely on them to validate their own findings, to increase collaboration between partners, and to avoid duplication.
By openly sharing these datasets, codes, and protocols, researchers eliminate barriers to future research that want to replicate and build on a previous study's findings. Moreover, by sharing research outputs, researchers can further stimulate new fields of enquiry and increase the number of papers that research projects produce.
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