The open science and research handbook

The text on this page is from The open science and research handbook, December 2014, English version

This handbook aims to help researchers, research organisations, decision-makers, financiers, and the general public promote the adoption and use of open science and research (OSR).

OSR opens new opportunities for participating in scientific research and applying research results, increasing the global contribution and social impact of scientific activities.

Finland seeks to become a leader in OSR, applying its principles to accelerate Finnish scientific research and boost its impact.

Achieving this goal will require the extensive participation of the research community and the internalisation of new working methods, but with the aid of OSR, we aim to boost the competitiveness and quality of Finland's research system, promoting reliability and transparency in scientific research.

This handbook aims to facilitate this process, and will be edited and enhanced by key stakeholders as we progress. Handbook versions approved by the strategy team will be published on the openscience.fi website.

Currently, the handbook comprises the following sections:

The key premises for OSR	Give to the strategy team, 2 June 2014
Promoting OSR	Give to the strategy team, 2 June 2014
General principles
Promoting openness in the research process
Measures for science policymakers
Measures for research financiers
Measures for research administration
Measures for research organisations and research teams
Measures for researchers
Putting OSR into practice	Additions from working groups and open comments during 2014; to be published in the forum on 25 November
Open research publications
Open research data
Open research methodologies
Open research infrastructures
Open research support services
International situation	Additions from working groups during 2014
Glossary	Additions from working groups and cooperation with the Ministry of Finance during 2014

The first version of this handbook includes Chapter 1, short versions of Chapters 2 and 4, and Chapter 5. Over the course of 2014, additions will be made by working groups from the OSR Initiative (ATT), from open comments, and from the road map.

Detailed guidelines and model processes will be inserted into Chapters 2 and 3 in particular.

Openness: The key premise of open science and research

Openness is a key principle of science and research, creating new opportunities for participation by researchers, decision-makers and the general public.

OSR is now a globally accepted way of promoting science and its social impact. In adopting OSR, we generate increased opportunity for transparency, repeatability and confirmation of research results.

For OSR to thrive, the research community needs wide-ranging access to the publications, data, methods, expertise, and support services generated by, and required for, scientific research.

Scientific knowledge is by nature open and responsible, and this openness should be reflected not only in data collection but also in research and evaluation methods. Others' desire to access and use research results indicates a study's significance and, because its results are widely used, openness also increases the impact of that research.

Science can be democratised through the use of new operating models for OSR. OSR is not just a collection of methods and recommendations — it's a way of thinking, of promoting open-mindedness and networking. Digitalisation has opened up the research process, creating new opportunities for cooperation and communication.

Openness provides potential for change. A key aspect of this is ensuring that emerging researchers working outside of established research infrastructures have equal opportunities for data access, something especially relevant in emerging countries.

Openness gives everyone the principled opportunity to research, criticise or affirm research results in accordance with their abilities. This increases trust in science, and boosts corporate activity. Intangible commodities such as data, publications, methods, and services also benefit from increased openness in science. Making materials more widely — or freely — available, can also increase the potential for innovation.

The aim of science has always been to promote high-quality research and best practice, and to prevent poor research and falsification. OSR by its nature supports this, requiring efficient, open methods for managing research data. OSR can be successfully adopted only if those responsible for research systems are motivated and trained to apply OSR principles. Every research system should routinely employ open methods for managing research data. The first practical requirement is that each actor must have clearly structured, up-­to-date descriptions of how to promote open science. With the aid of OSR, we can promote sustainability, usability, access, and trust in research.

OSR depends on openness in the research process and working culture. Models for openness can be used to create opportunities for rich dialogue, and to preserve and increase diversity.

Research data, along with its associated expertise and understanding, are distributed across a variety of research actors, networks and communities. In these circumstances, openness must be increased:

• inwardly: to bring new ideas to the research process.
• outwardly: to enable others to harness ideas in new ways.

The recipe to achieving OSR is simple: we make our research offerings openly available, and use this openness to increase our impact

1. We will choose to make our research offerings — including publications, data and methods - openly available in accordance with the principles of research ethics and the judicial environment, thus benefiting from the opportunities afforded by open access, open peer reviews, and parallel archiving. We will publish research results with an open licence (recommendation CC4.0 BY) and use support services that facilitate openness.
2. We will make full use of research offerings made openly available by others, ensuring we have the required expertise, open‐source software, and information about open standards and interfaces, as well as the solutions to implement them.

Benefits of OSR

OSR brings with it benefits including:

• Increased efficacy: We can use existing materials and methods to update our processes, resulting in faster development thanks to shared resources.
• Increased awareness of the scientific model: We can promote awareness of scientific methods and ways of working.
• Improved focus and better quality research results: We can confirm and validate data more quickly, improving quality and repeatability of results through greater transparency in research practices.
• Faster generation of new research ideas: We can more easily apply research results in real time.
• Increased commitment to science and improved scientific literacy: The general public can more easily access scientific results and methods.
• Increased economic and social impact: Businesses and decision-­makers can more easily access and harness research results and methods.

OSR creates opportunities for a variety of stakeholders to participate in brainstorming research topics, conducting research, evaluating results, and developing software.

The basic logic of science and research dictates that science, along with its methods and results, should be as open as possible. Using OSR, research results and new information can be confirmed and validated independently and without bias, and support structures are required for this validation.

In making data and research results open, we enable and further new businesses and innovations, such as the creation of new services and software.

Openness is also economical and effective (According to a study conducted by the European Commission, open data projects are expected to generate 140 billion per annum. The economic impact of open research data is not so straightforward. A recent study estimated that investments in availability services would generate income in a ratio of 2–10 to investments): previously collected data and information generated from it become globally, efficiently and equally accessible to all.

Openness also improves the quality of research: results and data enable scientific observations to be verified or challenged, so the global body of scientific knowledge can develop and correct itself faster and without redundancy.

Openness also promotes the faster transfer of information for use by all. It guarantees equal access to research data, regardless of geography.

Providing open access to research results and data in an information network increases the visibility of researchers, research results, and research institutions, and improves impact.

Different stakeholdersbenefit from OSR in different ways (Figure 1), including increased visibility (citations, mentions in social and other media), increased credits (references to publications, data and methods; awards for openness), increased funding (rewards for openness, awards for clear definitions of copyright/proprietary rights), and improved networking (new opportunities, better workload distribution, better results analyses). To harness these benefits, we must implement the measures that are covered in more detail in the Chapter Promoting OSR.

Enabling OSR

Barriers to OSR include:

1. The narrow reward culture in current academia: there is no real incentive to promote and reward openness
2. Lack of infrastructure to support openness: there is widespread uncertainty about how the costs of openness will be covered. For example, business models may prevent increased openness in some research institutions
3. Fear that raw data will be misinterpreted, methods misused, or data published too early
4. Uncertainty over the ownership of data and methods
5. Lack of expertise in promoting openness

These barriers are not insurmountable, and change can be supported by, for example:

1. Developing incentives to promote cultural change: we need to clearly define the rewards and requirements for openness using indicators, metrics, and career impact, for example
2. Promoting cooperation and interoperability: we need to build platforms for enabling and rewarding cooperation
3. Planning for the sustainable development of research services and infrastructures: we need to develop with interoperability in mind, using open-­source software, and open interfaces and standards whenever possible
4. Identifying OSR expertise and supporting its growth
5. Developing clear OSR policies and guidelines for every party involved

Openness is not black and white. In practice, we operate between the extremes of the open-­closed scale (Figure 2), seeking a functional combination of availability, machine readability, costs, and legality. For example, research that reuses materials subject to the Personal Data Act requires a data‐protection guarantee. In such instances, researchers are urged to be open with regard to their publications.