Open Science in Canada: Mapping Knowledge, Attitudes, Perceptions, and Implementation

Open science is a national priority in Canada, yet the transition from policy to practice depends on understanding the researchers whose behaviour these policies seek to change. We report a nationwide survey that comprehensively assesses the state of open science across Canadian higher education. Researchers and trainees recruited through 18 institutions (N = 705) rated 13 open science practices across five dimensions: awareness, knowledge, attitudes, perceptions, and implementation. Roughly one in three respondents had never heard of open science before the survey. Among those who had, attitudes were consistently positive and there was a widespread desire to learn more, but self-assessed knowledge was low and concentrated in two long-established practices — open access and open-source software — and implementation exceeded 20% for only four of the 13 practices. Researchers pointed to a lack of training and know-how, rather than a lack of interest, as the primary barriers. Two further patterns compounded these gaps: respondents underestimated how favourably their peers viewed open science while overestimating how much their peers practised it, and their stated intentions for the coming year ran well ahead of historically observed rates of adoption. Together, these findings describe a research community that is willing but underequipped and largely unaware of its own consensus, indicating that the main barriers to open science in Canada lie in capacity and perception rather than attitudes.