After three years of collaboration across four countries and multiple disciplines, the VOICES project has come to a close. Led by ScholCommLab co-director Juan Pablo Alperin, VOICES—short for “Value of Openness, Inclusion, Communication, and Engagement for Science in a Post-Pandemic World”—brought together researchers from Brazil, Canada, Germany, and the UK to investigate how open science (OS) was conceptualized, implemented, and communicated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal was to capture how OS was taken up and understood across different national, institutional, and disciplinary contexts—and to trace how (and whether) principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion were reflected in those efforts.

What We Did

To explore these questions, we combined a range of methods—including bibliometric and altmetric analysis, qualitative content and document analysis, and stakeholder interviews. Across four interconnected work packages, we examined different facets of OS during the pandemic, including: how OS was framed in media, policy, and expert discourse; how the pandemic shaped publication practices; how OS was mediated in the form of press releases and science news coverage; and how media attention to preprints and platform moderation practices evolved amid concerns about credibility and misinformation.

Our approach was not only interdisciplinary but also multilingual and context-sensitive: we collected and analyzed data in English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, examining OS practices and discourses across a range of institutional settings, national research systems, and media environments.

By coordinating data collection and interpretation across national teams, VOICES became one of the few comparative studies of COVID-era OS that integrated linguistic and regional diversity into its research design.

What We Found

A fuller account of our findings can be found in the final project report. Here, we share four key takeaways that surfaced across the project’s four work packages. Together, these findings show that while OS played a central role in the pandemic response, its implementation was often fragmented, temporary, and disconnected from broader goals of inclusion. 

• • Open science expanded during the pandemic—but unevenly

The pandemic spurred a rapid uptake of open practices like preprinting, data sharing, and public engagement. But this growth was far from uniform. The adoption of OS varied widely by country, language, and research field, and was often shaped by local infrastructure, policy environments, and institutional norms. These differences highlight the need for OS approaches that are flexible and responsive to diverse contexts.

• • Openness didn’t always mean inclusion

Although OS was widely framed as a public good, definitions of “openness” varied—and rarely prioritized equity, diversity, or inclusion. These values often remained aspirational, reflected in rhetoric but absent from the systems that structure access and participation. Across the project, we found that openness was typically pursued to accelerate dissemination and increase visibility, not to broaden participation or redistribute power. The infrastructures that enabled OS during the pandemic were seldom designed with equity or public accessibility in mind.

• • Emergency measures expanded access—but did only temporarily

At the height of the pandemic, research was made widely available—particularly through Bronze and Gold open access (OA)—as publishers lifted paywalls in response to global urgency. But as the crisis waned, so did the openness. Articles disappeared behind paywalls, and open access momentum slowed. This reversal exposed the fragility of temporary measures and underscored the need for stronger policies that treat OA as a durable public good, not a crisis exception.

• • OS and science communication remained disconnected

The pandemic exposed an ongoing disconnect between OS and science communication. Even as OS outputs increased, they were not always accessible or legible to wider publics. Institutional communication framed openness as a public benefit, yet rarely addressed the question of who could make use of that openness in practice. Journalistic engagement with preprints brought greater visibility to OS but also surfaced concerns around credibility and trust in science. The initial surge in media attention to preprints faded over time, highlighting the temporary nature of OS’s prominence in the public sphere.

Our Takeaways 

The pandemic demonstrated that OS can support more responsive, collaborative, and transparent science in moments of crisis. But it also revealed the limits of existing systems: participation remained uneven, access often depended on temporary policy shifts, and communication infrastructures struggled to bridge expert knowledge and public understanding.

While many OS practices gained momentum—especially early in the pandemic—much of that progress was ad hoc and difficult to sustain. Without stronger infrastructure, inclusive governance, and a deeper commitment to equity, the long-term potential of OS remains constrained. Put simply, to fulfill its promise, OS must be reimagined not just as a technical or policy shift, but as a political and social project that embeds inclusion into its goals, practices, and infrastructures from the outset.

 

 

Moving Forward

Preprints, in particular, emerged as a focal point during the pandemic—praised for accelerating knowledge dissemination, but also sparking debates about credibility, trust, and the responsibilities of those who share, moderate, and report on them. Yet their future remains ill-defined and uncertain. Journalists’ use of preprints is evolving, and preprint servers are navigating shifting moderation policies while being pulled in different directions by publishers, funders, and scholarly communities. 

These developments have also placed preprints at the center of broader conversations about research integrity—how it is safeguarded, by whom, and under what conditions. In this contested space, integrity is not simply about the accuracy of individual papers, but about how preprints are positioned and governed as part of the scholarly record. These tensions have sharpened debates over how evaluation systems should adapt, and whether open or hybrid forms of review can improve rigour and efficiency, and help build trust in science. 

Understanding the role of preprints in scholarly publishing and their intersections with review and evaluation processes is, therefore, more important than ever. Building on the insights from VOICES, the ScholCommLab is launching a new three-year project that will explore how preprints and open peer review are implemented across platforms and disciplines, how they are experienced by diverse stakeholders, and how these approaches influence the quality, fairness, and efficiency of scholarly communication.

 

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/scholcommlab.5587