Policy for Open Scholarship

Last updated 14.12.2022

The Policy for Open scholarship brings together the previous policies and recommendations made within the framework of the Open science and research coordination. The policy focuses on the culture of open scholarship of an organisation. In addition, previous policies will be supplemented with perspectives related to services, incentives, and interaction.

The policy includes broad themes not previously addressed in former policies for open science and research. Services, corporate cooperation, citizen science and evaluation have been chosen as essential promoters for openness. The policy objectives for evaluation development are based in comprehensive national and international work to promote responsible evaluation for researchers. As an an objective, it has been stated that organisations would have access to practices and criteria supporting the responsible evaluation of researchers as well as the knowledge base for documenting diverse outputs and merits. Through policy objectives, the needs for development should form as clear functions for the organisations. The policy is supported by three recommendations published with the policy. The policy and the recommendations form a unique whole, which supports, facilitates and promotes the work researchers and organisations do for a greater openness in science and research.

Timeline for policy development

The formation of the policy began in the expert panel for the policy for open scholarship in 2019 and since then multiple working groups have participated in policy development producing parts addressing themes such as services, corporate cooperation and citizen science. Request for comments was sent to higher education facilities, research institutes, learned societies, science and research funders, scientific libraries and archives in 9 November 2021. The recommendations were publicly open for comments for the research community until 20 December 2021. The comments were made possible to carry out personally or as an organisation. Moreover the recommendations supporting the policy have been open for comments between 17 January 2022 and 7 February 2022.

A risk analysis workshop for discussing possible risks associated with the implementation of the Policy for Culture of Open Scholarship as well as their categorization was held on 28 January 2022

The policy was approved by the steering group on 30 March 2022 and published on 28 April 2022.