Open science

Open science is an inclusive construct that combines various movements and practices aiming

• to increase scientific collaborations and sharing of information for the benefits of science and society,
• to make multilingual scientific knowledge openly available, accessible and reusable for everyone, and
• to open the processes of scientific knowledge creation, evaluation and communication to societal actors beyond the traditional scientific community (UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science).

Open science is at the centre of European research policy (The EU's open science policy). As an umbrella term, open science encompasses different aspects of science such as:

• open research, including 
  • open access to scholarly publications,
  • open access to research data and methods,
  • open scholarship culture, and
  • open source code.
• open education.                    

Picture: Innovation Platform France-Canada.

Hanken has been actively promoting open science and following the national and international principles and requirements of openness in science and research. Active promotion of open science is included in Hanken 2030 Strategy. The main objectives are to advance open access to research outputs including scientific publications, research data and methods, and responsible research assessment.

In August 2019, Hanken signed the Declaration for Open Science and Research (Finland) 2020-2025 and is committed to following the strategic principles, objectives, and action plans outlined in the four Policies of Open Science and Research in Finland to achieve the goals set out in the Declaration.

To continue to promote open science:

• Hanken endeavours to ensure that all the new annually reported peer-reviewed scientific articles are made available open access at time of publication, and that the archivable part of a thesis is openly accessible directly or upon request. See Hanken's guidelines on open access to scholarly publications.

• Hanken encourages that properly documented metadata of research data are published for the findability and reproducibility of the research data through, for example, the national Fairdata Qvain metadata tool. Research data are to be archived and opened in national or international repositories when possible. See Hanken's guidelines on open and FAIR research data.

• Hanken encourages the school’s researchers to make their analysis and research methods generally available and to open up the research process as early and widely as possible. See Hanken's guidelines on open research methods.

• Hanken has signed San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) agreement and is implementing its CoARA Action Plan in responsible research assessment. Open science practices are recognized in research assessment of both individual researchers and research performing organizations. See Hanken's guidelines on transparent and responsible research assessment.

For the full text of Hanken's Guidelines for Open Science and Research (2024, 3rd version), see the PDF file below:

Open science facilitates sharing and collaboration, views responsible openness as a component of research quality and impact across the life cycle of research, and can accelerate progress towards the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). Openness as a strategy for responsible science and impactful research both empowers and democratizes science.

More information about open science's benefits, see UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021, pp.2-5).

Hanken provides diverse training on open science strategies and practices and aims to make expertise in open science practices an integral part of research training.

• Contact haris@hanken.fi for support in open access publishing, for example:
  • green open access/self-archiving,
  • discounts on APCs, and
  • Hanken's central fund for open access publication fees. 
• Contact haris@hanken.fi. for support in Haris registration of research merits including publications, datasets, projects and activities. 
• Contact dataethics@hanken.fi for support in responsible and FAIR research data management (RDM), for example:
  • writing a data management plan (DMP),
  • how to handle personal data in studies and research,
  • ethical review, 
  • data storage, backup and transferal, and
  • metadata creation, data sharing and preservation. 

• Gender Equality, Responsible Research and Innovation Tools.
• Promotion of equality and nondiscrimination at the Research Council of Finland.
• Declaration for Open Science and Research 2020-2025, Open Science Coordination in Finland, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) (2020).​​​​   

Picture: Declaration for Open Science and Research 2020-2025