An analysis of the effects of open science indicators on citations in the French Open Science Monitor

Abstract: This study investigates the correlation of citation impact with various open science indicators (OSI) within the French Open Science Monitor (FOSM), a dataset comprising approximately 900,000 publications authored by French authors from 2020 to 2022. By integrating data from OpenAlex and Crossref, we analyze open science indicators such as the presence of a pre-print, data sharing, and software sharing in 576,537 publications in the FOSM dataset. Our analysis reveals a positive correlation between these OSI and citation counts. Considering our most complete citation prediction model, we find pre-prints are correlated with a significant positive effect of 19% on citation counts, software sharing of 13.5%, and data sharing of 14.3%. We find large variations in the correlations of OSIs with citations in different research disciplines, and observe that open access status of publications is correlated with a 8.6% increase in citations in our model. While these results remain observational and are limited to the scope of the analysis, they suggest a consistent correlation between citation advantages and open science indicators. Our results may be valuable to policy makers, funding agencies, researchers, publishers, institutions, and other stakeholders who are interested in understanding the academic impacts, or effects, of open science practices.