What is Open Science?

International institutions such as the UNESCO and the European Commission assume that the solution to the environmental, social, and economic challenges that the overall population faces, goes through the development of research. Research must be developed in an open environment, that is, a communication ecosystem that makes research outputs transparent, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. By opening up the research, science is done with and for society.

This new way of doing science is called open science.

Open access requirements demand researchers to follow procedures that were not common until now. Their compliance can be seen as an added difficulty. It is for this reason that the goal of a country’s research system is to make easy for researchers to follow open access requirements when publishing.

Open science and open research increase the quality and impact of science by encouraging reproducibility and interdisciplinarity. This makes science more efficient because resources are shared, more reliable because it reaches better verification and rigor, and more sensitive to the citizens needs.

The concept of open science emerged in 2014 due to the public consultation promoted by the European Commission (Science 2.0: Science in Transition). Since then, its meaning has been evolving, especially through the impulse of the Horizon 2020 framework program of the European Commission, and Horizon Europe, where open science becomes one of the main pillars of the new research and innovation program.

On this account, different institutions and European countries have drawn up national plans and roadmaps that indicate the steps to be followed to make open science effective.

In Catalonia, within the framework of the National Pact for the Knowledge Society, the Catalan Government approved the Catalan Strategy on Open Science and the Science Act 9/2022.

In Spain, open science has also been addressed at legislative level: article 39 of the 17/2022 Act which modifies Act 14/2011, of June 1st, on Science, Technology, and Innovation. And article 12 of the Law 2/2023 of the University System (LOSU). These provisions were expanded with the approval of the National Open Science Strategy (ENCA): 2023-2027.

At the European level, the objective is to build at the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a common and federated space for data and services to facilitate the achievement of open science goals. The EOSC has a defined strategic agenda and a multi-annual roadmap.

Among the national open science plans, some receive special attention:

Many institutions made roadmaps and recommendations of interest: