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Implementing Responsible Research and Societal Impact through Open Science and Research

As defined in the 2021 , the goal of open science is to expand access to scientific knowledge for the benefit of both science and society. Open science and research aims to promote opportunities for innovation and participation in scientific knowledge creation and the dissemination of its benefits.

Open science entails open access to publications, research data, methods, software codes, educational resources, and infrastructures. These practices are essential for enhancing the impact of research conducted at Aalto University. Transparent access to research outputs significantly improves their quality by making them more easily and efficiently verifiable, replicable, and extendable. The accessibility of publications, data, software, and educational resources helps to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilitates interdisciplinary research, and ensures equal access to research knowledge worldwide.

Academic personnel can leverage open practices to receive more citations and increased usage of their research outputs, attract greater media engagement, and foster wider collaboration. New research and researcher assessment practices advocated by, for example,  (CoARA) recognize the diverse outputs, practices, and activities that maximize the quality and impact of researchers and research.

Since Aalto University published its first open science and research policy, there have been notable changes in the research environment. The new policy addresses these developments.  Responsible internationalization has gained prominence, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) necessitates guidance on its responsible use in research and teaching. The advancement of Aalto University in open science and research since its first policy in 2020 is described.

Open science and research constitute an important aspect of responsible science and research, which also encompasses responsible internationalisation; research integrity and ethics; responsible research assessment; sustainability; and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

Aalto University has signed, among others, the following declarations or follows the recommendations listed below:

General Open Science Principles

1. Research outputs. Research outputs produced by Aalto community should be as open as possible, as closed as necessary. The degree of openness of research outputs may vary. 

2. Considerations of openeness. When considering the degree of openness, the following perspectives should be taken into account: compliance with laws and regulations, research integrity and ethics, data confidentiality and data security; and recommendations on open science. Commercial interests of publishers' requirements may restrict the opening of research outputs. 

See for detailed discussion and instructions: 

• Export controls and open science
• Aalto University’s, and recommendations
• Copyright
• Data protection policy and personal data in research
• Processing and classification of information
• International and  on open science and research

3. Supporting openness. The University supports the openness of science by creating incentives for open science and research. In the evaluation of academic work, activities related to open science and research are considered impact merits in recruitment and career promotion decisions. Aalto University grants an Open Science Award for advancing open science and research.

• Open Science activities are included in the TENK (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity)  and in the Aalto University Tenure Track evaluation criteria. 

4. Monitoring progress. Aalto University’s activities on open science and research are monitored every two years by Open Science Monitoring. Aalto University follows the development of open research outputs.

• The national monitoring results are available in , and Aalto’s results are findable 
• Aalto dashboard depicts the [internal link]. The number of datasets and software are followed in ACRIS .

5. Open scholarship culture. Aalto University follows the principles of the national .

Principles of Open Access Publishing

1. Responsible Research Practices: The Aalto community follows responsible research practices in publishing, selecting suitable, accessible, and high-quality publication channels.

2. Diverse Openness: Aalto University encourages the use of different open publication channels and formats. Aalto University promotes opening various publication types (e.g., reports, articles in professional journals) and using different publishing models (e.g., diamond open access publishing).

3. Publisher agreements (Read & Publish). Aalto University has agreements with publishers that enable open publishing. If the publication venue is not covered by these agreements, or the agreements only include a discount on the Article Processing Charge (APC), the fee must be covered either by project funding or the department’s core funding.

• Check Aalto University’s agreements, journal lists, and eligibility criteria. 

4. Open licenses. An open publication is assigned a license that defines the terms of use. License selection must follow funders’ requirements. Aalto University recommends Creative Commons licenses

• More More information on Creative Commons licenses.

5. Self-archiving and prior-licensing model. Peer-reviewed scientific articles (Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture publication types A1–A4) are self-archived in the university’s publication archive. Self-archiving ensures long-term preservation of publications.

a. If the publisher releases the article under an open license (e.g., Creative Commons), the publisher’s final version is self-archived (e.g., Version of Record, final published version). 

b. If the publisher releases the article behind a paywall, the peer-reviewed manuscript (e.g., Author Accepted Manuscript, AAM, final draft) is self-archived in accordance with Aalto University’s prior-licensing model, immediately open and under the Creative Commons license required by the funder. 

If the funder does not require a specific license, the peer-reviewed manuscript is self-archived without embargo and without a license.

• The prior-licensing model does not apply to manuscripts submitted for review before 1 January 2026, or if a researcher uses the opt-out right, as per the rector’s decision, not to follow prior-licensing. In these cases, the peer-reviewed manuscript is self-archived according to the publisher’s terms. 

With the prior-licensing model, Aalto University promotes immediate openness of publications in a financially sustainable way.

• Prior-licensing model at Aalto University
• Self-archiving at Aalto University

6. Responsible Publishing Guidance: Aalto University offers guidance on responsible publishing practices and how to avoid publishing in questionable channels. Authors must evaluate the integrity, practices, and reputation of the journals to which they plan to submit manuscripts.

• Predatory or pseudo journals pose a threat to scholarly publishing. Refrain from publishing in these journals and avoid being associated with them as a reviewer or board member. Belonging to the editorial board of such journals is considered ethical misconduct (misleading the scientific community).
• Authors are advised to check the  for information about journals.
• See guidance on opening research outputs.

6. Theses: All Doctoral theses and most of the Masters’ theses are openly accessible in the .

• According to , all Masters’ theses approved from 2025 onwards should be openly accessible. 

7. International Support: At the moment, Aalto University provides financial support to these international open science services and infrastructures.

Aalto University is committed to open access publishing.

Principles of Open and FAIR data

1. Data Management Planning. The strategy for opening research data should be planned at the beginning of the research process through data management plans (DMPs), agreements among parties involved in a project, and pre-registrations when pertinent.

2. Rights Transfer and Use: Many external funders require open access to research publications and data. To meet these requirements, the rights to research data must be transferred ºÚÁÏÍø University. Researchers retain their authorship rights and benefit from data use. Research data related to research outputs should be opened after the outputs have been published.

• See guidance on the roles of authors.
• See .

3. FAIR Data. Data linked to research publications and data with reuse value should be made FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

• Ethical or legal issues might prevent the opening of research data. Intellectual property agreements, protection of trade secrets, funders' requirements, and publishers' data availability policies should be considered.
• Research data should be stored in national or international repositories that provide persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as DOIs, to publish data in a citable format.
• Aalto University recommends research data to be opened with a CC BY 4.0 license to align with in , which is implemented in Finland in the national law . .
• Handling of personal data in research should adhere to the relevant legislation e.g. GDPR as well as Aalto University’s guidelines.
• Research data containing personal data should predominantly be published under controlled access. The personal data should be minimised so that only the personal data that is needed for the research project is deposited. It is sometimes possible to fully anonymise personal data and publish it openly, it is important to evaluate the possible risks of future re-identification accordingly to the level of sensitivity of the data involved.
• Metadata and data description are needed for reusability.

4. Data Reuse. Researchers should investigate the feasibility of data reuse before starting new data collection.

• See guidance on potential data sources and data reuse.

5. Metadata in ACRIS. Properly documented metadata for all datasets linked to research publications should be added to the Aalto University’s ACRIS system, even if the datasets cannot be made openly accessible.

• If your data is openly accessible in a repository, send the PID to researchdata@aalto.fi for ACRIS entry.

6. Citing Open Data. Openly accessible research data should be cited according to good scientific practice.

• See .

Aalto University is committed to good research data management, and opening data, research methods and infrastructures.

Principles of Open Research Protocols, Methods and Software

1. Sharing openly: Protocols, methods, and software codes should be shared openly, even when implemented with proprietary tools, to ensure transparency and replicability of the data collection and analysis process.

2. Free and Open Source Software (): Novel software packages should be shared openly with sufficient documentation to maximize reusability and adoption by the research community.

• Make codes and models transparent, e.g. by providing sufficient documentation of the codes or models when possible.
• Allow for open collaboration through channels that enable participation by the community in the development process (e.g. use GitHub pull requests and GitHub issues for discussions).
• Make the dissemination of the software open to allow it to be freely used and shared.

3. Licensing: When making protocols, methods, and software codes openly accessible, accompany them with appropriate licenses.

• Suitable licenses for open-source software include MIT, Apache 2.0, Creative Commons CC BY 4.0, or the GNU General Public License. The right choice for the license can depend on the philosophy of the developers as well as on restrictions imposed by any third-party libraries used.
• When a research project is done as part of a commercial collaboration or when other legal or ethical reasons apply, open licenses are not a suitable choice. Opening of certain systems, (e.g. AI, dual use technologies, export controls) are regulated by specific legislation. Turn to Research Services, , Legal services,  for advice.

4. Storing Derivative Outputs: Research results depicted as figures or tables reporting analyses should be stored in data repositories for future meta-analyses and replication.

5. Pre-Registration: Research protocols and analysis methods should be pre-registered before data collection and analysis when pertinent.

Aalto University is committed to good research data management, and opening data, research methods and infrastructures.

Principles of Open Research Infrastructures

Aalto University's provides open access to its high-value research and teaching infrastructures for academics, industry, and other actors.

Take a look at Aalto University's Policy on Open Research Infrastructures

Principles of Open Educational Resources (OER)

1. Utilization of OERs. In the development and utilization of open educational resources copyright, data protection and ethical principles are respected.

The teachers can use open educational resources made by others to their advantage as they are and adapt them to suit their own teaching. It is therefore recommended that open educational resources be distributed under a CC BY license, which allows the resources to be used and modified. The names of all those involved in the making of the resources must be mentioned in order for each of the authors to be honored. If the educational resources have been modified, this must be reflected in the materials.

• For more information about the licenses and the rights they grant, see .  In choosing the license, see 

2. Distribution of OERs. Pay attention to copyright and findability in the distribution of your educational resources

Teachers can save their open educational resources in the national Library of Open Educational Resources (). If the resources are already open in another service only the metadata and the link to the other service is needed in aoe.fi. It is recommended for the teachers to check their entitlement to open educational resources before distributing them, as the teachers are responsible for any copyright infringement.

3. Accessibility. Strive for good accessibility of open educational resources as well as applicability to a diversity of learners

Open educational resources should be accessible. Accessible educational resources support the equality and inclusion of learners. The learners can do their work when it suits them best, where it suits them, and at a pace that suits them.

• For further instructions, see Digital Accessibility | Aalto University, Teacher services | Aalto University, Aalto OpenLearning learning environment | Aalto University
• Use MyTeaching Support service request (), if you have questions e.g. about accessibility.
• lakimiehet-ttp@aalto.fi help with complicated license questions.

4. Meriting lecturers. Open educational resources are merits

Open educational resources bring out the teachers’ skills and may create new opportunities for collaboration. It is up to the teachers to decide what rights they grant to the educational resources when they own the copyright to the educational resources they have created. Activities related to open science and research are part of academic activities and are taken into account as merits in recruitment and promotion decisions.

• TENK (Finnish National Board on Research Integrity) ,  and the  recommend researchers and teachers to add the development and opening of learning materials to the merits. 

Aalto University is committed to Open Educational Resources.

Roles and Responsibilities

All researchers and doctoral students

• Familiarise yourself with university's research ethics and integrity guidelines and Code of Conduct.
• Familiarise yourself with open access publishing, such as Read & Publish agreements with publishers, self-archiving, and the prior-licensing model.
• Review funders’ open science requirements and take them into account when choosing a publication venue if your project is externally funded.
• Familiarise yourself with the guidance on research data management. Attend the bi-annual research data management and open science webinar series.
• Research data authorship, ownership, access rights, terms and conditions, storage and long-term preservation should be agreed as early and clearly as possible.
• When submitting a manuscript, indicate your affiliation with the department (not only the research group), and add the funder’s decision number (if your project is externally funded).
• Acknowledge the infrastructure (facilities or equipment) that you used in your research. Include the name of the infrastructure as an affiliation or add the infrastructure in the acknowledgements section of your paper. (see )
• Familiarise yourself with ACRIS (), the Aalto University research system. See ACRIS instructions.
• Use your ORCiD researcher identifier, especially when submitting research outputs, to improve your own visibility and interoperability.

Principal Investigator (PI)

• Principal investigator is responsible for creating a data management plan (DMP) at the early stage of the research project and for updating it during the project. PI has the overall responsibility for effective data management during their research project. DMP should clearly outline how the data can be opened and reused by present and future collaborators and define the responsibilities for a data manager.
• To facilitate use of data in publications,  agreement templates should be used.
• PIs may decide independently to release data under an open license if the data is owned by the university and/or by the researchers.
• In cases where research work may lead to commercial inventions and researchers are interested in this possibility, Innovation Services should be consulted (innovations@aalto.fi). In cases where intellectual property rights or other legal considerations are unclear, please consult your school’s legal services.

Aalto University management and service organisation

The vice president of research has the main responsibility in the strategy and development actions for open science and research topics. Research Steering Group is the main decision-making body.

In addition to tailor-made services, consultations, training and workshops, the following support addresses are available.

acris@aalto.fi

• Using ACRIS, e.g. improving visibility of research outputs and activities, solving access problems, improving visibility of research outputs and activities etc.
• Support for publication-related questions, e.g. choosing a journal, open access fees, avoiding predatory journals etc.
• Support for self-archiving and prior-license model.

manuscripts@aalto.fi

• Self-archiving service for peer-reviewed manuscripts.
• Agree on self-archiving with your co-authors before submitting your manuscript.

 researchdata@aalto.fi

• Advice on research data related questions.
• Send you Research Council of Finland DMP for a review. Experts from research services, data agent and RSE teams, IT and legal services are available.
• Send PID of your open or restricted access dataset for recording in ACRIS.
• Reach your data agent; hands-on, first point of contact on data-related questions in your department.

rse-group@aalto.fi

• The Aalto Research Software Engineers (RSE) provide specialist support regarding software, computing, and data. Services include e.g. custom software development or modification, code optimization, workflow automation or data services (optimizing I/O, data versioning, databases, data sharing, and opening). 

Definitions

• The Aalto University repository ACRIS and Aaltodoc together form Aalto publication repository. Researchers submit their manuscripts to ACRIS, which is integrated with Aaltodoc. Open access publications are findable through both ACRIS and Aaltodoc.
• APC (Article Processing Charges): A fee collected to cover the costs of gold open access publishing, e.g. for peer reviews.
• Data repository: An archive for publishing data and finding data for reuse. Publishing in a repository helps to store the data securely. Repositories also facilitate data citation when PIDs are used. Some data repositories restrict access, i.e. data may be shared on request only, but metadata may be openly accessible.
• Derivative outputs: Derivative outputs are the data that constitute the results in a research paper. They are embedded within the paper as figures and tables. However, since in most cases research papers are released as PDF documents, it may be difficult to extract this data. Sharing derivative outputs in a machine-readable format allows future researchers to reuse the published results for further analysis or meta-analysis. Derivative outputs can be stored in generic repositories (Zenodo, OSF), or in repositories dedicated to a specific field (e.g. NeuroVault for statistical brain maps).
• DMP (Data Management Plan): A formal document that specifies how research data is handled during and after a research project. The DMP identifies the key actions to be taken in order to ensure that the research data is of high quality and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). See: /en/services/data-management-plan-dmp.
• Embargo: A period of time set by a publisher during which the author is not permitted to publish a self-archived open-access copy of the publication or the dataset.
• FAIR: The FAIR Data Principles are a set of guidelines to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The principles provide guidance for the management and stewardship of scientific data. See: FAIR data | Aalto University
• Free software: Computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change and distribute it and any adapted versions. See: 
• Gold open access: A published article is immediately provided in open access mode by the scientific publisher. Associated costs are shifted from readers to the research organisation to which the researcher is affiliated. A gold open access fee is often called an Article Processing Charge (APC). Gold open access publishing may also be free of charge.
• Green open access (self-archiving / parallel publishing): The published article or the final peer-reviewed manuscript is archived in an online repository before, after or alongside its publication. Access to this article is often delayed by an embargo period.
• Hybrid open access: A subscription-based journal where only some of the articles are published open access. Open access publishing in a hybrid journal requires paying a separate APC fee.
• Metadata: Technical data that describe a research dataset and are necessary for the dataset to be reused. There are two main aspects of metadata: 1) the description of the data: how it was created, how to interpret it, what software is needed to use the data (for example, if in Crystallographic Information File format, ISO 19115) and 2) basic bibliographic information (archival metadata) that is needed to retrieve the dataset and make citations to it, including information about the creator, license, relevant dates, title, year of publication, repository, and identifier (for example, Dublin Core format).
• Method: A method is one or more steps in the step-by-step advancing activity list (protocol list). Method is also a way of collecting data or type of analytic operation by which data is processed (a statistical method, a machine-learning method, etc.). Detailed explanation of the methods used will ensure that the research output is easily reproducible.
• Open-source software: computer software in which the source code is released under a license where the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose.
• ORCID () provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers and supports automated linkages between a researcher and his/her professional activities.
• PID (persistent identifier) is a long-lasting reference to a digital resource. (e.g. DOI, ORCID). An identifieris a label which gives a unique name to an entity: a person, place, or thing.
• Predatory publishing is an exploitive academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy and without providing the other editorial and publishing services that legitimate academic journals provide, whether open access or not.
• Preregistration: When you preregister your research, you specify in advance the research plan of your study and submit it to a registry. Preregistration separates hypothesis-generating (exploratory) research from hypothesis-testing (confirmatory) research. Both are important. However, the same data cannot be used to generate and test a hypothesis, which can happen unintentionally and reduce the credibility of your results. Addressing this problem through planning improves the quality and transparency of your research. Preregistration helps you to report your study clearly and helps others who may wish to build on it.
• Protocol: A series of numbered steps to follow to reproduce the results obtained in a specific study. A protocol first lists the data collection, followed by the steps of the analysis including a list of the methods used and their codes, and lastly how the output was produced and distributed.
• Repository: A repository is a database or a virtual archive established to collect, disseminate and preserve scientific output (). There are preprint repositories (manuscripts before peer review, e.g. arXiv.org, bioRxiv.org), postprint repositories (manuscripts accepted for publication, e.g. ACRIS), data repositories (original data used in a study, e.g. Zenodo), protocol and method repositories (procedures to obtain the data and process the data, e.g. Open Science Framework), software repositories (software used to process the data as well as novel software packages that can be re-used by others, e.g. GitHub, Zenodo), derived data or output repositories (results are put in a machine-readable format, e.g. tables, processed data, statistical results, figures from paper, Zenodo, figshare).
• Research output: Research work that may be wholly in written form (journal or conference article, book, book chapter, working paper, etc.) or in the form of a composition, performance, exhibition or creative work (artistic output) or other approved work, e.g. datasets.
• Research data: Digital datasets that are generated, processed and used in scientific research, and used as the basis for research findings. Research data also include information describing the context, contents and structure of the data (metadata), along with its lifetime management and processing. In some fields, the basis for research findings may be physical primary materials, such as artistic objects or archival materials.
• Transformative agreements change the contract between a subscriber (e.g. a university library) and a publisher. The change is from a subscription model to an open access model.

Related documents 

Aalto University Code of Conduct Aalto University Data Protection Policy Code of Practice for Project-Based Research at Aalto University

Change log

The Aalto University Open Science and Research Policy is a living document that adapts to changes in needs, surroundings, and legislation. Please find changes to the current version in the table below. The changes are approved by the Vice President of Research.