About SCOPE
SCOPE's mission, initial focus, boundaries, and long-term vision.
Science Contribution, Organization, Policy, and Evaluation
SCOPE
Open research infrastructure for understanding how science is produced, evaluated, governed, and translated into public value.
Explore SCOPE
What SCOPE Provides
The open datasets, tools, reports, and public resources SCOPE will provide.
Research Scope
The inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and questions studied by SCOPE.
Guiding Principles
The evidence, reproducibility, measurement, ethics, and inclusion principles guiding SCOPE.
Community and Contributing
Who SCOPE serves, how the repository is organized, and how to contribute.
Reusable components
SCOPE sub-projects
Research Data Collector
Collect bounded, source-native public research metadata from approved scholarly APIs.
For Researchers, Data maintainers, Reproducibility reviewers
SCOPE Website
Publish SCOPE project and approved sub-project documentation as a public static site.
For Website maintainers, Contributors
Overview
SCOPE is an open, interdisciplinary project for the empirical study of science and academia.
The project develops reusable datasets, data-collection tools, analytical methods, reports, and public-facing visualizations concerning the organization and outputs of scientific research. Its central question is:
How effectively does the academic system transform resources—funding, talent, time, infrastructure, and public trust—into reliable knowledge and value for society?
Scientific publication has grown rapidly across many disciplines. In fields such as artificial intelligence, the cost of producing papers and written evaluations is being further reduced by generative AI. Meanwhile, peer-review capacity, researcher attention, replication effort, and institutional resources remain limited.
Growth alone does not demonstrate scientific progress, nor does it prove scientific decline. More publications may represent broader participation, new discoveries, and faster communication. They may also reflect fragmented contributions, duplicated effort, publication pressure, metric optimization, and an evaluation system struggling to process its own output.
SCOPE exists to make these questions measurable.
Rather than beginning from the assumption that academia is either healthy or broken, SCOPE aims to build the evidence needed to determine:
- what the academic system produces;
- how those outputs are evaluated and rewarded;
- which institutional incentives shape researcher behavior;
- how scientific knowledge is validated, consolidated, and reused;
- how research contributes to technology, policy, education, health, culture, and society;
- and which reforms could improve the reliability and public value of science.
Mission
SCOPE’s mission is to provide open and reproducible evidence for improving scientific institutions and research policy.
The project connects four areas:
- Science contribution — What knowledge, methods, technologies, infrastructure, and social benefits does research produce?
- Scientific organization — How do funding, careers, institutions, collaboration, peer review, and publication systems shape research?
- Research policy — How can evidence inform funding, evaluation, publishing, open-science, and academic governance policies?
- Evaluation — How should scientific quality and public value be assessed without reducing them to a small number of easily optimized metrics?
SCOPE is intended to support both research about science and practical reform of the systems through which science operates.