Berlin Science Survey (BSS) Dashboard (Charité subsample)

What are the views of Charité researchers on open science? How do they implement open science in their own work? Which difficulties do they face? These are questions, which the Berlin Science Survey (BSS) set out to answer for the Berlin metropolitan area. The BIH QUEST Center presents findings on open science aspects from the BSS in a dashboard, focusing on answers of Charité researchers.

The Berlin Science Survey (BSS) is a long-term online survey of scientists within the Berlin metropolitan area, designed as a trend study to be repeated every two years. It is conducted by the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies and funded by the Objective 3 Advancing Research Quality and Value of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA). The BSS is a multi-topic survey, which focuses on aspects of research integrity, knowledge transfer, scientific collaboration, and open science. For these topics, the survey studies the experiences and opinions of researchers, how they change over time, and which effects institutional activities of actors like the BUA might have.

The BIH QUEST Center is presenting, in collaboration with the Robert K. Merton Center, a BSS dashboard focusing on the responses given by Charité researchers on the topic of open science practices. The dashboard does not consider other sections of the survey, apart from general information on the participants and their research. Of the approximately 1100 participants overall, 227 were Charité researchers and are thus part of this sample. The BSS-Charité dashboard was developed within the project BUA Open Science Dashboards, also funded by the Objective 3 of the BUA.

A central outcome of the survey locates open science practices in relation to other goals pursued by researchers as e.g. methodological rigour and publication output. Due to limited resources, these goals are conflicting, and the prioritisation is presumably influenced by both external expectations and self-ascribed importance (i.e. internal values). The tension between these two forces is clearly visible in the results, and, as expected, the overall prioritisation is typically indicated to be between these two influencing factors, indicative of a trade-off. Importantly, of all goals offered, open science is the least prioritised, and unlike for other goals, internal valuation of open science hardly has an impact on overall practice. The data can be further parsed according to status groups of participants and characteristics of their research.

Further analyses include a juxtaposition of open science practices with perceived difficulties, as well as an assessment of how well open science aspects are implemented in the Berlin research environment, compared to other aspects of research. The last figure in the dashboard highlights that views towards open science depend on the status group (and thus, experience and age) of researchers. Overall, 86% of Charité researchers consider it "very important" or "fairly important" to expand open science practices in science as a whole. However, while scientists without a PhD overwhelmingly tend to find the expansion of open science important (94%), for professors, this number is substantially lower (68%). This is in line with results in other analyses, which indicate that early-career researchers attach more value to expanding open science practices.

The BSS-Charité dashboard complements other QUEST dashboards focusing on quantitative analyses of open and responsible research practices, namely the Charité Dashboard on Responsible Research and the Data Reusability (FAIR Data) Dashboard. In addition, the BSS survey results, especially with respect to data sharing, can be juxtaposed with the results of the Charité Survey on Research Data Management (in German).

The BSS-Charité Dashboard was implemented by QUEST alumnus Jan Taubitz.