About us
Open Science
Open science is based on the principle of openness and transparency in the activities that we carry out in the university, education, research and innovation, encouraging, whenever possible, the exchange of knowledge and collaboration between the actors involved. These open and transparent practices favour and reinforce basic academic values, and contribute to improving the quality, efficiency and responsiveness of the university to the challenges of society.
Open science is also key to increasing public trust in science and as a means to raise public interest and encourage public participation in research activities.
In recent years, the open science initiative has been evolving and progressively consolidating. In the European context, it has become one of the key elements in the new research and innovation (R&I) policies, especially in the Horizon Europe framework programme[1]. The European Commission refers to open science as a system change, which consists of sharing knowledge, data and tools from the earliest stages in the R&I process in collaboration with all relevant knowledge actors, including academia, the productive sector, government and public administration and end-users, citizens and society at large. In this new environment, open science has the potential to increase the quality, efficiency and impact of R&I, leading to a greater capacity to respond to societal challenges and to increase society's trust in the science system.
The UAB's open science strategy is aligned with the European Commission's policy in this area, as well as with the Catalan Open Science Strategy[2] (from the Pacte Nacional per a la Societat del Coneixement), which contains general recommendations and prioritised recommendations around the axes that should enable the deployment of open science in the European Union:
- Rewards and incentives
- New generation research indicators and metrics
- Future of scholarly communication
- European Open Science Cloud
- FAIR data
- Research integrity
- Entitlements and education
- Citizen science
- Other references when defining this strategy are the National Strategy on Open Science
Other references in the definition of this strategy are the National Strategy on Open Science[3] of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Commitments of the Universities to Open Science of the Spanish Universities of the CRUE[4], and the document UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science[5]
[1] https://www.ciencia.gob.es/dam/jcr:c30b29d7-abac-4b31-9156-809927b5ee49/ENCA.pdf
[2] https://www.crue.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/2019.02.20-Compromisos-CRUE_OPENSCIENCE-VF.pdf
[3] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379949_spa
[4] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2019-12/ec_rtd_factsheet-open-science_2019.pdf
[5] https://recercaiuniversitats.gencat.cat/ca/01_departament_recerca_i_universitats/PNSC/pacte-nacional-per-a-la-societat-del-coneixement/index.html
The paradigm shift implied by open science brings numerous benefits for research:
- Increasing visibility, reputation and recognition.
- Allowing authors to retain ownership of rights and set terms of use
- Promoting the rigour and quality of research
- Improve transparency in the evaluation and monitoring of research. Enhance credibility
- Solve current societal problems
- Return the investment in research to society
- Ensuring permanent access, not dependent on commercial initiatives.
- Contribute to economic and social growth
- Achieve collaborative, non-competitive science
- Accelerate innovation and increase efficiency
- To be able to do more research with the same data
- Enable the public to become a stakeholder in research, thereby increasing trust in research
- Contribute to the democratisation of knowledge