Toimintakulttuuri/en

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Policy for Open Scholarship

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Principle 1: Responsibility

Responsibility, i.e. reliability, ethics, repeatability and transparency, is a precondition for openness.

Principle 2: Reciprocity

The openness of the culture requires reciprocity, which is manifested in interaction that benefits both internal and external activities of the organisation.

Principle 3: Requirements

The realisation of a culture of open scholarship requires transparency, services and incentives.

Objective 1: Culture of open scholarship

The organisation has entrusted and scheduled the coordination, implementation and monitoring of open science services and sufficient support for the interaction of researchers with different actors in society.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Services. The organisation implements and monitors open science services in a coordinated manner.
2. Interaction. The organisation invests in communication, legal and IT services and courses of action that promote social interaction.
3. Data protection. The organisation shall ensure the lawful and responsible processing of personal data and confidential information containing all parties’ activities.
4. Cooperation. The organisation utilises national and international cooperation in the development of open science whenever possible and appropriate.

Objective 2: Business collaboration

The organisation promotes openness in research conducted in business collaboration by providing researchers with adequate and appropriate support and training.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Awareness. The organisation increases the personnel’s awareness of the starting points, methods and preconditions of open science in research conducted in business collaboration.
2. Guidelines. The organisation offers researchers clear guidelines for promoting openness in business projects.
3. Ownership and utilisation. The organisation ensures that the ownership, the utilisation and sharing of results and material is agreed upon with the business partner at the beginning of the project.
4. Agreement. The organisation concludes necessary agreements with the business partner in a transparent manner whenever possible.
5. Support services. The support services provided by the organisation have sufficient competence to take into account openness and the special features of business projects as part of the agreement process.
6. Publication and communication plan. The organisation supports the researcher in drawing up the publication and communication plan promoting openness in the early stages of the business science project.
7. Training. The organisation takes business projects into account in its open science training programmes.
8. Responsible conduct of research. The organisation ensures that researchers representing the organisation take care of the implementation of responsible conduct of research in business projects.

Objective 3: Citizen science

The organisation promotes the operational preconditions for citizen science by providing sufficient and appropriate support and training to the involved researchers and other parties.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Raising awareness. The organisation increases the personnel’s awareness of the starting points, methods and preconditions of open science in research conducted using methods of citizen science.
2. Guidelines. The organisation offers researchers clear guidelines for citizen science projects.
3. Training. The organisation takes citizen science into account in its open science training programmes.
4. Data management. The organisation supports the preparation of a data management plan in citizen science projects.
5. Communication. The organisation supports the researcher in publishing and communicating in a sufficiently popular manner in accordance with the principles of citizen science.
6. Publication and communication plan. The organisation supports the researcher in drawing up the publication and communication plan in the early stages of the citizen science project.
7. Responsible conduct of research. The organisation ensures that the researcher leading a citizen science project takes care of the implementation of responsible conduct of research.
8. Systems. The organisation ensures that the systems supporting citizen science projects are brought to an adequate level.

Objective 4: Education

The organisation promotes the culture of open education by providing up-to-date services to ensure that all persons providing education have equal opportunities to organise open education and to prepare and publish open educational resources regardless of the organisation, field of education or career stage.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Competence requirements for open education. In cooperation with open scholarship coordination, the organisation ensures that the persons providing education have the opportunity to acquire the competence to utilise and create open educational resources in accordance with the national competence requirements for open education.
2. Copyright, licenses and agreements. The organisation requires respect for copyright in the organisation of open education and in the preparation and production of open educational materials and provide support for open licensing of educational materials.
3. Resource findability. The organisation recommends that the authors of open educational resources make the metadata of the educational resources available in the Library of Open Educational Resources as comprehensively as possible.
4. Resource accessibility. The organisation ensures that the provided open education and open educational resources comply with the national accessibility criteria.
5. Communication. The organisation ensures that their communication channels features communication related to open education.
6. E-education tools. The organisation ensures that persons providing education have access to e-education tools that enable making the education open and support for using them.
7. Quality criteria and editorial support. The organisation provides support for developing the quality of open education and open educational resources.
8. Use of open education materials in teaching. The organisation encourages education providers to use open education materials in teaching.

Objective 5: Research data

The organisation promotes the transparency of research data in accordance with the FAIR principles. Services are available for research organisation personnel and students at all stages of the data lifecycle. The services ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to access at least the metadata of the research and, when feasible, all research data available for reuse regardless of the organisation, field of research, funding base or career stage.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Local support for data management. The organisation provides local support that complements generic data management services for all stages of the data lifecycle and enables researchers and support service experts to specialise as research field, method or data type specific local support.
2. Training. Data management training is available in the organisation. Personnel and students are encouraged to participate in the training.
3. Data management plans. The organisation requires and supports research, development and innovation projects to create and maintain a data management plan throughout the data lifecycle.
4. Immaterial and agreement services. The organisation has built a researcher-driven process to take the intellectual property, contract and permit issues of research data into account in research projects.
5. Data protection and information security services. In order to ensure data protection, the organisation has arranged support services, training and secure data collection, processing and storage infrastructure services for research projects.
6. Persistent identifiers. The organisation assists researchers in obtaining ORCiD researcher identifiers and persistent identifiers of (meta)data.
7. Publication of data. The organisation accumulates and maintains comprehensive and open metadata for research data, which may also be linked to research methods, publications and infrastructures, if the nature of the data makes this possible
8. Digital preservation. The organisation ensures the long-term preservation of research data by outlining the storage periods and locations of different types of data and by providing advice and technical support, if necessary, in cooperation with other organisations.

Objective 6: Publications

The organisation promotes the culture of open publication by providing up-to-date services to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to openly publish the results of their research and development work regardless of the organisation, field of research, funding base or career stage.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Local support for open publication. The organisation creates support services for open publication either alone or in cooperation with other organisations.
2. Open access repository. The organisation maintains a publication archive or a comparable system, either alone or together with other organisations.
3. Use of open publications. The organisation encourages personnel to use open publications in teaching, research, expert work and studies.
4. New open publication forms, practices and publishing platforms. The organisation promotes the development of open publication practices and formats as well as publication platforms both nationally and internationally.
5. Open theses. Organisations have policies and guidelines for the open publication of theses and a platform for their publication.
6. Science publishing. The organisation’s own scientific publishing is supported, and publication production is open and licensed with open licences.
7. Persistent identifiers. The organisation ensures the use of persistent identifiers.
8. Digital preservation. The organisation ensures the long-term preservation and availability of open publications, making use of suitable national and international services/service providers.
9. Monitoring the costs of openness. The organisation has an idea of the costs of openness and an understanding of how the open publication of the organisation is structured.

Objective 7: Responsible assessment

The organisation has at its disposal practices, criteria and a knowledge base for documenting diverse outputs and merits that promote open science and its culture as part of the assessment and merit of Finnish research organisations and their personnel.

Actions required to achieve the objective:

1. Responsible practices. The organisation ensures that the evaluation of research and a researcher follows the responsible and transparent practices in accordance with the Good practice in researcher evaluation recommendation.
2. Incentives. The organisation ensures that the evaluation of research and researchers takes into account the research output with different formats and languages (e.g. publications, data, software), merits and effectiveness as well as activities to promote open science.
3. Knowledge base. The organisation enables and ensures that an open science knowledge base is produced to support the evaluations, which enables comprehensive and comparable documentation of research outputs, merits and impact in different forms.
4. Qualitative evaluation support. The organisation enables the production and utilisation of qualitative information, such as narratives and case descriptions of quality and research impact, in evaluations.
5. Transparency and monitoring. The organisation ensures that the evaluations are conducted in an open and transparent manner and that the implementation of responsible assessment is monitored in all evaluation processes from the organisational level to the individual level.
6. Guidelines and local support. The organisation ensures that all parties of the evaluation have adequate guidance, guidelines and resources for responsible assessment.
7. Responsible party. The organisation determines a responsible party that researchers can contact should there be shortcomings in the responsibility of the evaluation.

In this policy, culture of open scholarship refers to the working environment and methods of science and research.

Business collaboration refers to collaboration between research organisations and companies for consideration or free of charge, which may vary from informal interaction to organised collaboration. Forms of collaboration include contract research, commissioned research, training and consulting. The collaboration can be funded by a public or private sector organisation.

Citizen science is scientific research conducted partly or entirely by amateur scientists. Citizen science can also serve official information. Citizen scientists can participate in research in many ways. For example, they can collect, classify or analyse data needed for a study. In responsible citizen science, it is important that the people are not the subjects of the research but the authors of it. There is no need to be a trained scientist to participate in research. Citizen science can also be referred to as community science, crowd-sourced science or volunteer monitoring. Citizen science requirements:

1. Citizen scientists are involved at least at one stage of the research.
2. Citizen scientists are not the subjects of the research but the authors of it.
3. Research must usually be led by a trained researcher.

The National recommendation on competence requirements for open education defines the knowledge and skills required for competence in open education. The competence requirements form a three-step, cumulative scale:

• the user of open educational resources understands the basic concepts of open education and is able to place them in the wider field of open science and research, understands the rights and obligations that copyright law imposes on the user of educational resources, knows how to find and use open educational resources and other materials in their teaching respecting the copyrights and licence clauses as well as knows how to assess the quality of open educational resources,
• the author of open educational resources understands the rights and obligations that copyright law imposes on the author of educational resources, knows how to prepare, publish and describe open educational resources, understands the data protection and information security issues related to open educational resources and is able to demonstrate merit in the preparation of open educational resources,
• the open education influencer is familiar with open educational practices, knows how to cocreate open educational resources and open online courses and is familiar with networking and merit practices in open education.

Research data is material collected, detected, measured or created to confirm hypotheses and verify research results. Research data can usually be in digital format but also in analogue or physical format (e.g., laboratory journals).

FAIR principles are a set of guidelines to make research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. This facilitates scientific discovery and access to knowledge. (Open Science and Research Coordination in Finland 2023, 34.)

The publication in its entirety is available on the Internet free of charge and without restrictions to read, print and copy at least for non-commercial use.