Authority vs. incentives: Comparison of central and local government policies to promote openness of scientific facilities and instruments.

The openness of scientific facilities and instruments is a part of open science, which can help improve the efficiency of resource utilization and promote more research outputs. Policies is a key driving force for the openness, but studies to analyze such policies are still lackluster. This study conducted a text analysis of 23 central government policies and 65 local government policies in the time-tool framework, and found two types of authority tools: mandatory openness and duplicate review, as well as various incentive tools to give positive and negative payment. It reveals that provincial governments follow and tighten the screws of authority tools from the central government, and meanwhile, carry out policy innovation in incentive tools. Based on the investigation of practice in the openness of scientific facilities and instruments, this study proposes four policy suggestions: paying more attention to the utilization rate and outputs, improving the institutional design of duplicate review at different levels, linking research funding to open sharing, and promoting talent development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]