Research workflows and Open Science

The open science paradigm is increasingly praised and encouraged for improving efficiency through deduplication of efforts and for ultimately accelerating scientific discoveries. Such shift towards a collaborative and inclusive scientific process implies an alteration of the traditional research workflows to include the different dimensions that characterise the new paradigm, from open access to new assessment metrics. This systematic study analyses the open science research workflows proposed so far, highlighting (i) their distribution over time, (ii) the various means and approaches used for communicating them, (iii) the terminology used for denominating them, and (iv) the scientific domains where workflows were proposed. Moreover, the workflows were analysed and compared concerning a set of open science aspects deriving from the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. Overall, a total of 40 relevant studies were identified and analysed, corresponding to 33 unique workflows. The findings highlight (a) the limited effort spent by the research community to propose and communicate workflows oriented to match open science requirements, and (b) the different nuances of the meaning and understanding of open science and the resulting gap between its theoretical aspects and its practical application to the research processes.