PLOS Open Science Indicators
This dataset contains article metadata and information about Open Science Indicators for approximately 139,000 research articles published in PLOS journals from 1 January 2018 to 30 March 2025 and a set of approximately 28,000 comparator articles published in non-PLOS journals. This is the tenth release of this dataset, which will be updated with new versions on an annual basis.
This version of the Open Science Indicators dataset shares the indicators seen in the previous versions as well as fully operationalised protocols and study registration indicators, which were previously only shared in preliminary forms. The v10 dataset focuses on detection of five Open Science practices by analysing the XML of published research articles:
- Sharing of research data, in particular data shared in data repositories
- Sharing of code
- Posting of preprints
- Sharing of protocols
- Sharing of study registrations
The dataset provides data and code generation and sharing rates, the location of shared data and code (whether in Supporting Information or in an online repository). It also provides preprint, protocol and study registration sharing rates as well as details of the shared output, such as publication date, URL/DOI/Registration Identifier and platform used. Additional data fields are also provided for each article analysed. This release has been run using an updated preprint detection method (see OSI-Methods-Statement_v10_Jul25.pdf for details). Further information on the methods used to collect and analyse the data can be found in Documentation.
Further information on the principles and requirements for developing Open Science Indicators is available in https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21640889.
Data folders/files
Data Files folder
This folder contains the main OSI dataset files PLOS-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv and Comparator-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv, which contain
- descriptive metadata, e.g. article title, publication data, author countries, is taken from the article .xml files
- additional information around the Open Science Indicators derived algorithmically
and the OSI-Summary-statistics_v10_Jul25.xlsx file contains the summary data for both PLOS-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv and Comparator-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv.
Documentation folder
This file contains documentation related to the main data files. The file OSI-Methods-Statement_v10_Jul25.pdf describes the methods underlying the data collection and analysis. OSI-Column-Descriptions_v10_Jul25.pdf describes the fields used in PLOS-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv and Comparator-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv. OSI-Repository-List_v1_Dec22.xlsx lists the repositories and their characteristics used to identify specific repositories in the PLOS-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv and Comparator-Dataset_v10_Jul25.csv repository fields.
The folder also contains documentation originally shared alongside the preliminary versions of the protocols and study registration indicators in order to give fuller details of their detection methods.
Contact details for further information:
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Director, Open Research Solutions, PLOS, ihrynaszkiewicz@plos.org / plos@plos.org
Lauren Cadwallader, Open Research Manager, PLOS, lcadwallader@plos.org / plos@plos.org
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to Allegra Pearce, Tim Vines, Asura Enkhbayar, Scott Kerr and parth sarin of DataSeer for contributing to data acquisition and supporting information.
