Scops owls are typical owls in family Strigidae belonging to the genus Otus and are restricted to the Old World. Otus is the largest genus of owls with 59 species. Scops owls are colored in various brownish hues, sometimes with a lighter underside and/or face, which helps to camouflage them against the bark of trees. Some are polymorphic, occurring in a greyish- and a reddish-brown morph. They are small and agile, with both sexes being compact in size and shape. Female scops owls are usually larger than males.

For most of the 20th century, this genus included the American screech owls, which are now again separated in Megascops based on a range of behavioral, biogeographical, morphological and DNA sequence data.

The genus Otus was introduced in 1769 by the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant for the Indian scops owl (O. bakkamoena). The name is derived from the Latin word otus and the Greek word ὦτος ōtos meaning horned or eared owl (cf. οὖς, GEN ὠτός, "ear"). The generic name Scops that was proposed by Marie Jules César Savigny in 1809 is a junior synonym and is derived from the Greek σκώψ (skōps) meaning small kind of owl, Otus scops.

By the mid-19th century, it was becoming clear that Otus encompassed more than one genus. First, in 1848, the screech owls were split off as Megascops. The white-faced owls of Africa, with their huge eyes and striking facial coloration, were separated in Ptilopsis in 1851. In 1854, the highly apomorphic white-throated screech owl of the Andes was placed in the monotypic genus Macabra. Gymnasio was established in the same year for the Puerto Rican owl, and the bare-legged owl (or "Cuban screech owl") was separated in Gymnoglaux the following year; the latter genus was sometimes merged with Gymnasio by subsequent authors. The Palau scops owl, described only in 1872 and little-known to this day, was eventually separated in Pyrroglaux by Yoshimaro Yamashina in 1938.^{[citation needed]}

In the early 20th century, the lumping-together of taxa had come to be preferred. The 3rd edition of the AOU checklist in 1910 placed the screech owls back in Otus. Although this move was never unequivocally accepted, it was the dominant treatment throughout most of the 20th century. In 1988 it was attempted to resolve this by re-establishing all those genera split some 140 years earlier at subgenus rank inside Otus. Still, the diversity and distinctness of the group failed to come together in a good evolutionary and phylogenetic picture, and it was not until the availability of DNA sequence data that this could be resolved. In 1999, a preliminary study of mtDNA cytochrome b across a wide range of owls found that even the treatment as subgenera was probably unsustainable and suggested that most of the genera proposed around 1850 should be accepted. Though there was some debate about the reliability of these findings at first, they have been confirmed by subsequent studies. In 2003, the AOU formally re-accepted the genus Megascops again.

The genus Otus contains 59 species (including 3 extinct species):

Two extinct species are sometimes placed in the genus:

An apparent Otus owl was heard calling at about 1,000 meters ASL south of the summit of Camiguin in the Philippines on May 14, 1994. No scops owls had previously known from this island, and given that new species of Otus are occasionally discovered, it may have been an undescribed taxon.