National Open Access Desk

Each of the Finnish universities has their own local Open Science Support Unit, typically based at the university libraries and research services.

Responsible research coordination (https://avointiede.fi/en) at Federation of Finnish Learned Societies together with the expert panels is working on national structure for RDM support and training.

National Open Science courses:

• Open Science: tutkijoiden ja tutkimushallinnon peruskurssi verkko-opiskeluna (In Finnish)
• MOOC: Avoimen tieteen verkkokurssi (in Finnish and in English)

The Ministry of Education and Culture as part of the Government steers and finances the activities of higher education institutions that are autonomous actors. The objectives of science policy include "to bolster the research infrastructure" and "to safeguard the openness of research and science".The Research and Innovation Council, advisory body chaired by the Prime Minister, adopted its vision and roadmapin October 2017. The roadmap reaches to 2030 and states that “openness of science will be promoted on several fronts”.

The Finnish research community has jointly created a Declaration for Open Science and Research. The declaration was prepared by the Open Science Coordination in Finland and was approved by the National Open Science and Research Steering Group in December 2019. The declaration provides a common direction for the development of the research community. The declaration outlines a vision, where open science and research are seamlessly integrated in researchers' everyday work. The declaration defines four objectives that specify how openness will become part of the daily life of researchers and scientists: (1) research culture, (2) open access to research publications, (3) open access to research data and methods, and (4) open education and educational resources as promoted by the research community.

In addition to the Declaration for Open Science and Research, there are policies of open science and research that outline in detail the strategic principles, objectives and action plans necessary to achieve the objectives set out in the declaration. You can see the current status of the policy documents on the Open Science Coordination's website.

On a practical level, the Open Science in Finland is also significantly affected by FinELib's negotiations with scientific publishers (see FinELib’s policy on open access and transformative agreements) and the Ministry of Education and Culture's additional fundingfor open access publications: in the newfunding model from 2021, open access publications will be rewarded a coefficient of 1.2.

Atlas of Open Science and Research in Finland 2019 is an evaluation of the openness of Finnish research organisations, research-funding organisations, academic and cultural institutes abroad and learned societies and academies completed by the Ministry of Education and Culture. It states about the policies of:

• publications: “About 80 % of the higher education institutions have principles which recommend or encourage the use of open-access channels for publishing and more than 60 % require the use of open-access channels. Nearly all (93 %) of the universities and 88 % of the universities of applied sciences have recommendations on self-archiving publications in institutional or other repositories. Of the HEIs, 60 % require self-archiving research publications and has a support process place for it.”

• methods: “Compared to the previous evaluation, there has been significant improvements in developing the principles for the openness of research methods (including algorithms and code). Openness of research methods is surprisingly well managed in policies and almost all of the universities and more than 70 % of the universities of applied sciences have policies and principles for this. Almost half of the universities and about 40 % of the universities of applied sciences require openness of research methods.”
• research data: “The availability, use and licensing of research data is also very well managed. Every university has a data policy and implementation plan recommending openness of research data, whereas eight universities of applied sciences have not yet set principles for open research data. Ten out of thirteen universities and almost half of the universities of applied sciences require open licensing of research data and use of agreed open repositories."

ROARMAP lists 33 open access mandates in Finland, either on the funder or on the institutional level, and OpenDOAR lists 22 Finnish repositories.