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New Aalto University Open Science and Research Policy has been published. Research Services and data agents prepared the new policy in co-operation with Aalto community. Feedback from researchers was taken carefully into account.

Head of Open Science and ACRIS team Anne Sunikka led the process.

Why a new Aalto University Open Science and Research policy has been prepared?

The open access publishing principles of Aalto University were published in 2014, parallel publishing recommendation in 2018, and research data policy in 2016. Legislation and requirements for research ethics and openness of research output have rapidly evolved. It was simply time for Aalto University to update the open science and research policy.

Open science and research practices enable wide use of research outputs and increase the effectiveness and findability of research-based knowledge. This in turn promotes the creation of innovations. Open science and research practices increase equality and improve the quality of research. Using the new opportunities provided by openness is part of a researcher’s toolkit.

What will change?

In addition to open access publishing, and research data management and open data, the policy also covers protocols, methods and software. The policy also describes the division of responsibilities between researchers, principle investigators and service organization.

What are the highlights of the new policy?

The guiding principle ‘as open as possible as closed as necessary’ means that if there is no valid reason to restrict opening articles, datasets, protocols, methods and code, researchers should open their research output. Hopefully, the structure of the policy, i.e. after each principle, there are links to concrete advice and more information about the subject, facilitates the burden of finding help.

What is required from the researcher and how they are helped?

We ask Aalto’s researcher (including doctoral students) to act according to a good scientific practice in acknowledging funders and infrastructures. We encourage them to draw up data management plan and update it during their research.

We want to make Aalto’s researchers aware that we have services that help them in research data management (RDM), opening publications, data, protocols and code. We offer our researchers agreements and discounts in article processing charges, manuscript service for parallel publishing, RDM training twice a year, review service and training for DMPs and dataset service for adding metadata of research data to ACRIS. In addition, we provide them computing, storage and backup infrastructure.

How can members of Aalto Community give feedback on the policy?

You can send your feedback to researchdata@aalto.fi. The support address has a network of data experts answering questions about research data. In addition, the data agents working in the schools and departments are happy to receive feedback on the policy.

More information:

Aalto University Open Science and Research PolicyData agents and data advisorOpen Science and Research Research Data Management Open Access Publishing