Open Science
This chapter was written in collaboration with research support functions at Stockholm University, Karolinska Institutet, Umeå University Library, Chalmers, SciLifeLab and Swedish National Data Service. This chapter is published under the Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0.
Open Science is about making the scientific process transparent and ensuring that the results and outputs are accessible to everyone. Better accessibility enables new, robust, and reproducible research, and enables future research to efficiently build upon previous research.
There are many ways you can be open about your research. Your choices will depend on the nature of your research, your personal preferences, and the merit system in your field (i.e., the benefits for you and your research). It will also depend on the requirements of your university, your funder(s), and your publisher.
Common requirements: Open Access and FAIR
According to the Swedish Research Bill (2020/21:60) (and SFS), access to data from publicly funded research should be as open as possible and as restricted as necessary. Where possible, scholarly publications and underpinning research data (and any other outputs from the research process that you deem a valuable contribution to your field, such as source code, lab notes, or reports) should be published with Open Access and made FAIR.
The policies of Swedish universities and funders often recommend or require that scholarly publications and research data are published with Open Access and made FAIR. According to Data Availability Policies, most publishers request that you make your research data available when you publish an article.
Open Access means that a research output is made freely available online, preferably under a license that clearly states the conditions for reuse. Creative Commons licenses are widely used for digital material.
FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) means that a research output should be easy to retrieve, understand, and reuse in the future. FAIR is often mentioned with research data but can apply to any research output. FAIR is achieved through providing research outputs with context, called metadata. Metadata are structured information that help describe, explain or locate the research output. Metadata can include author(s), title, a persistent identifier such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), detailed descriptions, usage license information, associated publications, and links to associated relevant information.
How to publish Open Access and FAIR
The publication channel (e.g., scholarly journal or book publisher, publishing platform, data, or code repository) you use to disseminate your research should support you in making your research outputs both Open Access and FAIR.
You publish openly by selecting an Open Access usage license for your research output. For articles, many universities negotiate deals with publishers to help administer and possibly fund immediate Open Access publishing (gold or hybrid OA). An alternative route to Open Access (green OA) is to share your article from an institutional archive (e.g., DiVA). Many publishers will allow you to share only the Author Accepted Manuscript and not the published article. Find out more about the policy of your journal publisher in the Sherpa Romeo database. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database where Open Access journals that meet criteria for peer review and quality control are listed. By consulting DOAJ, you can avoid predatory publishers who do not adequately check the quality and legitimacy of the papers they accept. For books the infrastructure is less developed. OA Books Toolkit is a helpful resource on open book publishing. As for the publication of research data or source code, you are recommended to publish in appropriate repositories. You are responsible for assuring that data you publish openly don’t contain personal or sensitive personal data (GDPR), intellectual property data, commercial or financial data, or otherwise sensitive data (according to Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act). Consult the data support unit of your university, colleagues in your field, or visit re3data.org to find repositories appropriate for your data or code.
When it comes to FAIRness, publishers help you document and generate FAIR metadata for digital scholarly publications. For other research outputs, such as research data or source code, you create and provide much of the metadata necessary to make the material FAIR yourself. You increase the FAIRness of your data or code by comprehensively describing it and publishing it in an appropriate, trustworthy repository that helps you create standardized metadata. A trustworthy repository (p. 11-14) provides your material with a persistent identifier, allows you to document metadata and choose a usage license for your material, and ensures preservation.
Always interlink your work by referring to the persistent identifier (e.g., DOI) of the published results in the published research data, and vice versa.
Consult your university research support
As a researcher, you decide what, when and where you wish to publish. It can be hard to know whether or not to make your research data freely available. You should always conduct Open Science in alignment with existing laws, regulations and policies. Include aspects of Open Science already in the ethical review (if applicable). Consult the research support of your university early to enable your research data to be as open as possible and as restricted as necessary and to find out what policies and support your university has for Open Science.