Alongside the question of how Open Science practices can be taken into account in research evaluation, there is also the issue of how their adoption can be made recognisable and systematically tracked.

Badges like the Open Science Badges of the Center for Open Science are an example of signalling: the deliberate act of making open research practices visible to others. They give readers a quick and simple visual indication of which Open Science practices have been implemented in a publication. As a result, they serve as an incentive for researchers to share Open Data and other research materials and to engage in preregistration and certify that the corresponding content is available at a permanently accessible location.

Open Science Badges are currently offered predominantly by journals in psychology and the neurosciences. In economics and business studies, only a small number of journals – such as the Strategic Management Journal or Management and Organization Review – have adopted the badges of the Center for Open Science so far; their adoption in the field is still at an early stage.

There is empirical evidence that the introduction of badges can significantly increase the proportion of articles with open data. Open Science Badges can also increase trust in researchers, as shown by the study "Do Open Science Badges Increase Trust in Scientists among Undergraduates, Scientists, and the Public?" in the context of psychology.

While badges signal at the level of individual articles whether Open Science practices have been implemented, there are growing efforts to measure their uptake more systematically – across journals, institutions, disciplines, and countries. This matters because it is only through such monitoring that we can determine whether Open Science policies are actually working, where gaps exist, and how practices are changing over time and across disciplines.

One concrete tool for this are the Open Science Indicators (OSI) by PLOS. Using text analysis and language models, five Open Science practices are automatically extracted from published articles: the sharing of data and code, the posting of preprints, the disclosure of protocols, and pre-registration. The results are available in a freely accessible dashboard. As the underlying dataset is currently limited in scope and covers predominantly publications from the natural and life sciences, its informative value remains restricted.

At the national level, several monitors already track Open Science practices, such as the French Open Science Monitor, the Slovenian Open Science Monitor, or the Japan Open Science Monitor. At the European level, the Open Science Observatory by OpenAIRE provides country-level indicators on Open Science outputs across Europe. The EOSC Open Science Observatory goes further, measuring not only research outputs but also Open Science policies, infrastructures, and investments across Europe, and is aimed specifically at decision-makers.

At the global level, the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI) – founded in 2023 by, amongst others, PLOS, UNESCO, Charité, and SPARC Europe – coordinates the development of shared principles for sustainable and responsible monitoring of Open Science worldwide. The EOSC Observatory explicitly aligns itself with these principles.