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:
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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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 Benefits of open data and data reuse 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.
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:
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.
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.
Scopus: Scopus Author Identifier, Scopus Affiliation Identifier.
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.
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.