An overview of open science in eco-evo research and the publisher effect.

Khalid Belkhir, Carole M Smadja, Pierre-Olivier Antoine, Céline Scornavacca, Nicolas Galtier

Sharing data and code is increasingly recognized as essential for transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. This is especially critical in ecology and evolutionary biology (eco-evo), where sampling and experiments often occur in the field and can hardly be reproduced. To monitor the adoption of open science practices in eco-evo and identify key influencing factors, we analyzed 550 articles published in 2024 in 110 journals randomly sampled from the DAFNEE database. We assessed the rate of data and code sharing and examined its relationship with journal subfield, citation index, business model, partnership, and publisher. We report that about one third of eco-evo articles published in 2024 share data and/or code - excluding omics data, for which sharing is much more frequent. Data and code sharing is more prevalent in fundamental than applied fields, and shows only a weak correlation with journal citation indices. Notably, we uncovered a strong publisher effect, and report that publishers who partner with academic institutions are the ones who tend to promote open science. Our findings highlight the importance of editorial frameworks in promoting data and code sharing and offer insights into how open science can be further fostered within the eco-evo research community.