Estonia has not implemented a national Open Access/Open Science policy yet. However, in 2015, Open Science Expert Group was initiated by the Estonian Research Council to support drafting a national Open Science policy by complying principles and recommendations for the development of national open science policy. These recommendations were published in June 2016. This document is recommendations of the expert committee and should not be considered national policy on Open Science but rather a set of recommendations for developing future national OS policy.

From the end of 2019, the Ministry of Education and Research in Estonia has started to develop a Roadmap for an Open Science Policy Framework which is expected to result in official policy in a couple of years. It is expected that in a few years, this policy can result in the establishment of Estonian Open Science Competence Center which is a central support system for open science implementation in Estonia.

Estonian Research Council has started to require research data management plans from all personal grant applications and has officially started to evaluate these DMPs.

The Estonian Research Information System (ETIS) is developing into the Estonian research information database, including the central repository of research publications. Starting from 2013, the competition-based funding instruments (institutional and personal research funding) include a requirement for open access: “The publications that result from the implementation of the research theme shall be freely available to the public in ETIS, unless set forth otherwise in the conditions for publication, and for the protection of copyright or intellectual property rights.”