Speaker: Iain Hrynaszkiewicz

Institution: PLOS

Date: 14:00 BST, 1st October, 2026

Talk Title: Understanding the prevalence and impact of open, reproducible research practices

Abstract: Numerous international, regional, institutional, and research community initiatives promote the adoption of open, reproducible research practices — to improve research efficiency, utility, quality, accountability, inclusivity, collaboration, and impact. Until recently those interested in understanding (and rewarding) these research practices have lacked sufficient data or tools to understand the extent to which open research (open science) is being adopted, and its effects on research and research culture. Among other early adopters of open science monitoring, PLOS (with DataSeer) developed Open Science Indicators (OSI), a public dataset that measures open science practices across the published literature. In the 2026 edition, five indicators of open science practice are extracted and created using a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence tools applied to the full text of journal articles. Built on the OSI data, PLOS also released in 2026 an OSI dashboard prototype, a free visual, web-based interface to explore the OSI data. Through academic collaborations and experimental use of LLMs, our group has also assessed academic impacts of open science practices. PLOS and collaborators at the University of Bologna, and University of Copenhagen have shown — within the PLOS OSI dataset and more recently for an entire country, France — that research articles that share research data in repositories, share code, and share preprints can expect to receive more citations on average than similar articles that do not adopt these open science practices. With DataSeer, we have also developed a novel approach for measuring research data reuse in scholarly publications using generative artificial intelligence, with preliminary results showing that data reuse occurs at a much higher rate than traditional bibliometric or other research approaches are able to detect. In addition to these open science monitoring results, this talk will demonstrate the community’s growing, collective ability to understand how research practices are evolving, and how these novel metrics could support improved approaches to research assessment — while acknowledging the limitations of quantitative metrics alone for assessing research and researchers.

Bio: Iain Hrynaszkiewicz is Director, Open Research Solutions and occasional meta-researcher at Public Library of Science (PLOS), where he leads a programme of activity to understand and increase adoption of open science practices, and increase the benefits of adopting open science. This includes responsibilities for a variety of research activities, PLOS’ Open Science Indicators (monitoring) solutions, and PLOS’ initiatives relating preprints, data sharing, code sharing, and open methods. Iain was previously Head of Data Publishing at Springer Nature responsible for Scientific Data journal and where he developed and implemented research data sharing policies across nearly 2000 journals, and created data curation, researcher training, and compliance monitoring services to support data sharing. Iain founded and is co-chair of an Interest Group in the Research Data Alliance (RDA) on research data policy, is a member of the board of the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI), and former member of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines Advisory Board, and former Non-Executive Director of the UK clinical trials register, ISRCTN. He has spent more than 20 years in open research publishing roles and published more than 50 research outputs on topics including scholarly publishing, open access, open science, and reproducible research.