Infrastructures for Open Science: Metrics, Analytics, and Responsible Assessment

Open science is reshaping how research is created, shared, connected, and evaluated. Scholarly communication increasingly depends on digital infrastructures that support the discovery, dissemination, reuse, and preservation of research outputs, including articles, data, software, and workflows. These infrastructures are no longer passive repositories; they are active environments that enable interoperability, transparency, and collaboration across the research lifecycle. At the same time, the growth of repositories, federated services, research graphs, and distributed information systems has created new opportunities for metrics and analytics that capture research uptake, collaboration patterns, and knowledge circulation in more contextual ways. As institutions and funders seek alternatives to narrow evaluation models, understanding how infrastructures shape evidence, visibility, and assessment have become essential for building robust and socially responsible research ecosystems.

This Research Topic addresses a central challenge in contemporary scholarly communication: how open science infrastructures can support meaningful metrics, trustworthy analytics, and responsible assessment. While repositories, digital libraries, metadata frameworks, and federated platforms now generate unprecedented volumes of scholarly data, important questions remain about interoperability, data quality, provenance, governance, and the appropriate use of indicators. Recent advances in open scholarly metadata, persistent identifiers, research graphs, and analytics services make it possible to connect diverse research outputs and generate richer evidence for decision-making. At the same time, these advances require closer examination of how technical systems shape what is visible, measurable, and rewarded. This Topic aims to bring together conceptual, empirical, and technical contributions that show how infrastructure design can improve the reliability, inclusiveness, and practical value of metrics and analytics while aligning assessment practices with open science values.

This Research Topic welcomes contributions on the role of infrastructures in enabling open science, research analytics, and responsible assessment across the research lifecycle. Themes which may be explored in the collection, include, but are not limited to:

• Digital library and repository infrastructures for open science
• Interoperability frameworks, metadata standards, persistent identifiers, and linked scholarly data
• Integration of publications, datasets, software, and other research products
• Analytics services based on open scholarly metadata and usage data
• Responsible indicators and contextual metrics for research assessment
• Federated and distributed infrastructures, including EOSC-related services
• Data quality, provenance, transparency, and reproducibility in research analytics
• Dashboards, observatories, governance, sustainability, and issues of inclusion, bias, and fairness

We welcome Original Research, Methods, Policy and Practice Reviews, Systematic Reviews, and Perspectives. Submissions should provide clear, transferable insights into how open science infrastructures shape the communication, analysis, and evaluation of research.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: open science infrastructure; responsible research assessment; scholarly communication; research analytics; digital libraries; EOSC; interoperability; repositories; metadata; scholarly knowledge ecosystems

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.