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Open science

Open scholarship culture

Open science has urged the whole research community to think about how to increase the transparency of research and how to change the ways in which:

The Finnish national Policy for open scholarship was published in 2022 as part of the four Policies of Open Science and Research in Finland to achieve the goals set out in the Declaration for Open Science and Research (Finland) 2020-2025. Hanken signed the Declaration in August 2019.

This Policy for open scholarship sets forth strategic principles, objectives, and actions for open scholarship culture, business collaboration, citizen science, open education, open research data, open access to scholarly publications, and responsible research assessment. The Policy has been supplemented with three recommendations for open scholarship: 

  • The self-evaluation tool for culture of open scholarship services: The purpose of the tool is to assist a research organisation in making and self-assessing its open scholarship services. Different measures promoting responsible research evaluation, open education, and open access to research data and publications are made concrete with minimum and optimal criteria. These measures and criteria are also used in the national monitoring model for open science to assess the maturity level of an organization’s open science aspects.
  • Recommendation for citizen science: This recommendation aims to provide research organisations and funders operating in the interface of the civil society with principles and guidelines for promoting citizen science. The recommendation answers the questions on how to make citizen science projects more appealing to researchers and how citizen science methods give researchers recognition and merits, and provides a basis for ensuring the quality of citizen science research in the Finnish scientific community.

Responsible research evaluation

Hanken has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment and is committed to support the principles of responsible research evaluation.

  • The DORA Declaration recognizes the need to improve the ways in which researchers and research outputs are evaluated. 22,674 individuals and organizations in 159 countries have signed DORA since 2012.
  • The CoARA Agreement sets a shared direction on the basis of common principles within an agreed time frame for changes in assessment practices for research, researchers, and research performing organisations. The overarching goals of the Agreement are to maximise the quality and impact of research and to advance diversity, openness, and equality in research and research assessment. 441 organisations have signed the agreement to date since 2022.

Open science has a crucial role in the new research assessment principles and commitments which promote that Open science practices ought to be rewarded and taken into consideration in research assessment of both individual researchers and research performing organisations.

Hanken's guidelines on transparent and responsible research evaluation

Hanken follows the international initiatives and development in responsible metrics including San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the national recommendation on Good practice in research evaluation. Recommendation for the responsible evaluation of a researcher in Finland. Hanken has been developing research evaluation practices, incentives, and services needed to support open science and research, and monitors the development of researchers’ and teachers’ meriting practices at the national and international levels.

In decisions requiring the evaluation of scientific quality, Hanken applies Good practice in research evaluation. Recommendation for the responsible evaluation of a researcher in Finland. In particular, the evaluation of scientific quality is primarily carried out by examining the scientific content of research outputs. In the evaluation, Hanken will take into account research outputs in different formats and languages. The indicators of scientific quality include the methods, data, theoretical frameworks, and the relevance of the research outputs to the development of the discipline. Research metrics may be used to support the overall assessment, but they must not replace evaluation on the basis of the scientific content of the research output.

As stated in Good practice in research evaluation. Recommendation for the responsible evaluation of a researcher in Finland, researchers’ activities to pro­mote open access to research outputs including scholarly publications and research data, as well as researchers’ engagement in societal interaction and science communication, are considered as academic merits and part of research evaluation.

Hanken recommends researchers to use TENK’s Template for researcher’s curriculum vitae which includes open science and research activities and aims to present a researcher’s research and impact merits as comprehensively and comparably as possible. 

Altmetrics (alternative metrics) services including Altmetric and PlumX have been integrated into Haris public portal as a complement to traditional, citation-based metrics to measure the impact of research and display how much and what a wider range of types of attention a research output has received in the society. Hanken encourages researchers to actively inform the academic community about their research outputs, make the general public aware of them, and take part in societal discussion, in order to facilitate innovation and cooperation within the academic community, between research and industry, and between science and society at large. Hanken’s Marketing and communication services help researchers in issues related to research communication. When assessing research, the value of research outputs and various different indicators, including qualitative indicators such as the impact on society, are all taken into account.

Activities related to open science and research are part of academic work and are included as impact merits in the school’s evaluation criteria of recruitments and career promotion decisions. As soon as conveniently and administratively possible, Hanken applies Good practice in research evaluation. Recommendation for the responsible evaluation of a researcher in Finland in recruitments and career systems, and non-discriminatory incentives for research, open access to scholarly publications, and FAIR data production are connected to Hanken’s Publication awards system.

Citizen science

citizen science          citizen science

Pictures: citizenscience.org, European Commission

Citizen science is listed as one of the 8 ambitions of the EU's open science policy. The term citizen science can be described as the voluntary participation of non-professional scientists in scientific research process and activities in different possible ways: as observers, as funders, from shaping research agendas and policies, to gathering, processing and analysing data, and assessing the outcomes of research. The term also refers to the public’s better understanding of science through open publications, research data and process. Citizen science allows for the democratisation of science and reinforces societal trust in science.

In responsible citizen science, it is important that the people are not the subjects of the research but the authors of it. Citizen science requires that:

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

The researcher need to ensure that the amateur scientists are offered material in a sufficiently general language during and after the research.

See example projects in the Zooniverse – People-powered research.

Video: Citizen Science: Opening up science to society, EU Science & Innovation.

Improve the visibility and impact of your research

Hanken encourages researchers to actively inform the academic community about their research outputs, make the general public aware of them, and take part in societal discussion, in order to facilitate innovation and cooperation both within the academic community and between research and industry. Hanken’s Marketing and communication services help researchers in issues related to research communication.

Communicating research outputs can improve your visibility and impact as a researcher. It is important to formulate your own communication strategy and employ different ways to increase the visibility and impact of your research. It is always beneficial to publish your article in a journal which is indexed in the most popular databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. This improves the visibility of the article in the research community. There are, however, many other ways to increase the visibility and impact of your research, for example:

  • Registering your publications and research data in Haris: 

Haris public portal pulls data from Haris database, and is also integrated with researchers’ personal Hanken webpages. These three together publicly display Hanken researchers' publications, data, activities, and projects, and improves the visibility of Hanken’s research achievements on both institutional level and researchers’ individual level.  

  • Open accessibility of your research outputs: 

When publications and research data are published freely accessible, they are more used and cited. Open access and open data increase the visibility and impact of your research, speed up the adoption of your research findings, and facilitate disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. See Why OA? in the LibGuide on Open access and Data publishing and pre­ser­va­tion in the LibGuide on Research data management (RDM).

It is recommended to provide open access to research outputs beyond publications and data (e.g., research methods, software tools, models, apps) and share them as widely as possible.

  • Early and open sharing of research:

It is also recommended to share your research as early as possible. Horizon Europe, for example, recommends early and open sharing of research which supports research reproducibility and helps researchers secure precedence over their findings and conclusions. Examples of early-sharing practices include preregistration, registered reports, and preprints:

  • Preregistration separates hypothesis-generating with existing observations (exploratory) from hypothesis-testing with new observations (confirmatory). Progress in science relies on both. But the same data cannot be used to generate and test a hypothesis. Ordinary biases in human reasoning such as hindsight bias can happen and reduce the credibility of the research results. Preregistration of the research plan in a public repository such as OSF makes available the research hypothesis, study design and planned analysis before data is collected. Preregistration increases the transparency, credibility and reproducibility of the results and helps addressing publication bias toward positive findings. More information, see Future-proof your research. Preregister your next study by the Centre for open science.
  • Registered reports are research articles that are peer-reviewed and published in two stages. The study design and analysis plan including hypothesis and methodology undergo peer-review of the quality and suitability of the research question and protocol. If accepted, research protocols are preregistered and the final research article is provisionally accepted for publication. After the research is conducted, an article containing the results and discussion as well as any changes is submitted and undergoes a second round of peer-reviewing. The image below by the Centre for open science illustrates this process:

registered_reports.width-800 

Registered reports get expert reviewer feedback when it is most useful and can have higher acceptance rate. They are accepted before you start data collection and analysis and will be published based on the quality of the research, regardless of the eventual results. 

Registered reports offer a remedy for a range of reporting and publication biases, promotes research reproducibility, transparency and self-correction, and can help reshape how society evaluates research and researchers (See Chambers, Christopher D. and Loukia Tzavella. 2022. The past, present and future of Registered Reports. Nature Human Behaviour 6, 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01193-7). 

A majority of registered reports were submitted by early career researchers, and there are a number of rewards for junior researchers who choose to submit registered reports. You can find the FAQs, the list of Participating journals and their guidelines on the page Registered Reports: Peer review before results are known to align scientific values and practices of the Centre for open science. A number of the journals are within economics and business administration fields.

  • Preprints are scientific manuscripts that are publicly shared prior to peer-review and journal publication via preprint platforms such as Zenodo, Preprints, SocArXiv and arXiv.
  • Networks in social media: 

Social media offer opportunities for researchers to network with their colleagues and make their research visible to both their peers and the general public, for example, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Note that it is recommended to share the information about your research via the above-mentioned social media to increase the visibility and impact of your research. Researchers are, however, responsible for any content they upload or share via social media, which is protected by copyright. Check in advance each publisher’s self-archiving policy if you have the necessary right to share a version of your publications through these forums.

  • Researcher profiles: You can create your researcher profiles in different citation databases. 
    • Profile in Scopus, Scopus Author Identifier, and Scopus Affiliation Identifier: Scopus automatically creates researcher profiles with author identifiers. Researchers can request for corrections, if needed.
    • Web of Science Researcher Profiles: After registration in the ResearcherID service, researchers can create a researcher profile and through it maintain their list of publications. They can also supplement their profiles with affiliation information and monitor both the citation data and h-index from the Web of Science.
    • Google Scholar profile: Google Scholar does not automatically create profiles for researchers. However, you can create a Google account and collect all your articles found in Google Scholar to your My Citations page. The profile can be made public or kept private.

Altmetrics (alternative metrics), often called the next-generation metrics, serve as a complement to traditional, citation-based metrics to showcase how much and what a wider range of types of attention a research output has received in society. Altmetrics services including Altmetric and PlumX have been integrated into Haris public portal. More information, see Altmetrics in the LibGuide on Bibliometrics. 

  • Be involved in citizen science: 

Citizen science is listed as one of the 8 ambitions of the EU's open science policy. The term citizen science can be described as the voluntary participation of non-professional scientists in scientific research process and activities in different possible ways: as observers, as funders, from shaping research agendas and policies, to gathering, processing and analysing data, and assessing the outcomes of research. The term also refers to the public’s better understanding of science through open publications, research data and process. Citizen science allows for the democratisation of science and reinforces societal trust in science. More information, see the section above on Citizen science. 

Additional resources