FWF Open Science Monitor
An open-source platform making open-science metrics for Austrian-funded research transparent and accessible.
About This Project
The FWF Open Science Monitor is a monitoring platform that tracks open-science compliance across research projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). It measures and visualises key indicators – open-access publication rates, open data adoption, open software practices, and funding trends – across institutions, disciplines, and years.
The goal is to make these metrics freely available in one place, helping funders, researchers, and the public understand how Austrian science is progressing towards open-science principles.
The project is fully open source. View the source on GitHub.
The FWF Open Science Monitor platform was developed and is maintained by Quoc-Tan Tran, Open Science researcher at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, with technical support provided by Claude AI.
Data Sources
- FWF Open API
- openapi.fwf.ac.at – the primary source for all project, output, institution, and funding data. The API is maintained by FWF and updated daily. Coverage spans FWF-funded projects from 1995 onwards.
- Licence
- All data served by the FWF Open API is published under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (public domain) licence – it may be freely used, copied, and redistributed without restriction.
- Upstream sources behind the API
- The FWF Open API aggregates from two underlying sources:
- Researchfish– PI-reported outputs submitted annually by grant holders. Includes publications, research data, software, science-communication activities, and further funding.
- Dimensions– Automated bibliometric matching that enriches outputs with DOIs, PubMed IDs, citation counts, and journal metadata.
- Mock / benchmark data
- Comparisons involving non-Austrian institutions (e.g. Germany) are based on simulated benchmark data. Germany’s equivalent funder (DFG) does not publish a comparable open API. Mock values were generated using statistical distributions similar to the FWF dataset solely for illustrative purposes. These comparisons are labelled clearly wherever they appear.
Metric Definitions
| Metric | What it measures | How it is calculated | Key caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| OA Publication Rate | Share of publication outputs associated with an open-access identifier. | publications where hasDoi = true OR hasPmid = true, divided by total publications × 100 | DOI or PubMed ID presence is used as a proxy. A DOI does not guarantee the full text is freely accessible. |
| Open Data Rate | Share of research-data outputs that were explicitly shared with others. | data outputs where providedToOthers = true, divided by total data outputs × 100 | Self-reported by PIs via Researchfish. Outputs without a response are treated as not open. |
| Open Software Rate | Share of software outputs that have a persistent identifier (DOI). | software outputs where hasDoi = true, divided by total software outputs × 100 | DOI presence is a proxy for public availability. Software hosted only on GitHub without a Zenodo DOI will not be counted. |
| Funding Efficiency | Average approved grant amount per project and average output count per project, tracked by year. | SUM(approvedAmount) / COUNT(projects) per approval year; AVG(outputCount) per project | Funding amounts are only available for projects approved from 2012 onwards. Projects without amounts are excluded. |
| Institutional Rankings | Institutions ranked by project count, output count, or OA publication rate. | Aggregated from the piInstitutionRor field on each project. Counts include all historical projects. | Institutions without a ROR identifier are excluded from rankings. A single institution may appear under multiple ROR IDs if its name changed. |
Limitations and Caveats
- OA status is a proxy, not a verified check. A DOI or PubMed ID indicates that an output has a persistent identifier, but does not confirm whether the full text is freely accessible. Version-of-record paywalls are not detected.
- Funding amounts are only available from 2012 onwards. Pre-2012 projects exist in the dataset but have
approvedAmount = null. Any metric involving funding is computed only over projects with a non-null amount. - ORCID has been mandatory for FWF grantees only since 2016. Older projects frequently have no ORCID recorded for the principal investigator. Researcher Explorer results for pre-2016 grants may therefore be incomplete.
- Output data depends on PI self-reporting via Researchfish. PIs submit outputs annually; completeness varies by grant and by how diligently the reporting obligation is fulfilled. Under-reporting is likely, particularly for older grants.
- Austrian–German comparison figures are mock data.No equivalent open API exists for Germany’s DFG. The benchmark values shown in the Researcher Explorer and any cross-national comparisons are statistically generated and labelled clearly. They should not be used for policy conclusions.
- Not all outputs carry persistent identifiers.Conference papers, book chapters, and non-traditional outputs often lack a DOI or PMID, which causes them to be counted as “not open access” even if they are freely available elsewhere.
- Output and project IDs change daily in the upstream API.The ETL pipeline uses FWF’s own identifiers, which may be reassigned during nightly updates. Bookmarked project URLs may break after a resync.
Technical Architecture
Next.js 16
Full-stack React framework (App Router, server components)
Prisma + PostgreSQL
Database ORM with type-safe queries
Tailwind CSS v4
Utility-first styling with native dark-mode support
Recharts 2
Composable SVG chart library built on D3
Python ETL pipeline
Data ingestion, normalisation, and metric computation
FWF Open API
Primary source for all project, output, and funding data
The ETL pipeline fetches paginated data from the FWF Open API, normalises it into a PostgreSQL schema, and pre-computes metric snapshots stored in the MetricSnapshot table for fast dashboard queries.
Full system design: docs/architecture.md
License and Attribution
Application code
Released under the MIT License. Free to use, modify, and distribute with attribution.
Data
All FWF data is published under CC0 1.0 – no rights reserved. No attribution is required, but citing the source is appreciated.
How to cite
Tran, Q.-T. (2025). Open-science metrics for FWF-funded research. GitHub. https://github.com/qtan-tran/fwf-open-science-monitor
Data source: FWF Open API (CC0). https://openapi.fwf.ac.at
Contributing
Contributions are welcome – whether that is a bug fix, a new metric, improved documentation, or a question.
- Guidelines:CONTRIBUTING.md
- Report an issue:GitHub Issues
- Source:github.com/qtan-tran/fwf-open-science-monitor