The Ministry of Education and Culture is responsible for the planning and implementation of higher education and science policy. There are a total of 13 universities and 22 universities of applied sciences in Finland. A total of 12 State research institutes operate under the auspices of the other ministries. The Academy of Finland is a key source of funding for scientific research in Finland, and it operates under the mandate of the Ministry's Department for Higher Education and Science Policy.
The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) is an independent state-subsidized organisationthat promotes the communication and publication of scientific data and increases awareness of research data and its utilisation by society. TSV coordinates national level Open Science co-operation.
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.
The Finnish model for Open Science coordination involves universities, polytechnics, research institutes, funding bodies, libraries and archives. The coordination is supported by The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) with funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture.
The coordination is based on collaboration between working groups, expert groups and strategy group. In the centre of the coordination work are fourOpen Science Expert Panels: Culture of open scholarship, Open data, Open access and Open education.
One result of this cooperation is the Declaration for Open Science and Research 2020-2025. 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 into researchers' everyday work.
Open Science coordination in Finland participates actively in many open science networks in Europe and globally (eg.CoNOSC and EOSC).
Responsible research is present in the activities and communication of the TSV and the research support bodies associated with it: the Open Science Coordination, the Publication Forum (JUFO), the Committee for Public Information (TJNK) and the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity TENK.
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.
The Academy of Finland is a key source of funding for scientific research in Finland. In its policy on open science, the Academy of Finland states: “We require that the scientific publications on the results of Academy-funded research projects are open access, and that the research data produced by the projects are made widely available. The degrees of data openness may justifiably vary, ranging from fully open to strictly confidential.” The Academy is also part of cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders that promotes open access to research publications in accordance with the Plan S initiative.
Business Finland is the Finnish government organization for innovation funding and trade, travel and investment promotion.In its Funding terms and conditions for research organisations, Business Finland states: “The Funder requires that the publications resulting of the project work and results and the research data must be made openly available following the beneficiary’s internal guidelines for open access.” See the funding terms and conditions of Business Finland.
Kone Foundation is an independent non-profit organisation funding research and the arts. In its Ethical considerations, reuse of research materials and open access, it states: “We recommend that data collected during research funded by Kone Foundation be archived for possible future use. – – We recommend that researchers we have been funding make their research results freely available to all. – – When it funds projects, the Foundation can also provide funding for the processing fees of open access journals.”
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."
Ministry of Education and Culture in cooperation with CSC – IT Center for Science provides information about research in Finland on theResearch.fi website. At the moment (March 2021) there information about publications, projects, infrastructures and organisations. Sections for people, researcher data and other activities are coming soon.
CSC - IT Center for Science is the most important Finnish service provider for research. Services are provided through several channels:
Promotion of open science and research is a joint effort by the entire research community, done in four expert panels and their working groups. The Finnish Federation of Learned Societies coordinates this work. Expert panels: Culture of open scholarship, Open data, Open access, Open education
RDA in Finland - The National Node is hosted at CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd., hence actively acting as a mediator and promoting RDA in Finland and also abroad. National Node acts as the local point of contact between national data practitioners and RDA.
In January 2021 started EOSC Finnish Forumas a national level coordination instrument that will allow the Finnish stakeholders to follow the EOSC developments and assess their implications, represent the collective interests of Finland to EOSC and discuss potential future EOSC-related collaborations.
Journal.fi is a journal management and publishing service provided by theFederation of Finnish Learned Societies. The site features 100 Finnish scholarly journals (March 2021), with more to come. Journal.fi is designed to meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers and funders in the age of Open Access journals. The service is using the Open Journal Systems 3.1 software.
FinELib is a consortium of Finnish universities, research institutions and public libraries. It negotiates e-resource license agreements for the Finnish scholarly community. On FinELib-pages, you can monitor the progress and results of these negotiations. The central goal of the FinELib consortium is immediate open publishing of scholarly publications. This goal is in the line with PLAN S of the cOAlition S science financiers. (https://finelib.fi/negotiations/goals/)
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.
This blog post is first in a series of blogs describing RDM support activities in participating institutions. The series is produced by the Taskforce OpenAIRE: Institutional RDM support.Support Services Preparations for building a solid Research Data Management (RDM) support started more than ten years ago at the University of Helsinki. In an early project at the life sciences campus researchers ...
This text was written by Joonas Nikkanen (CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland) and Jochen Schirrwagen (Bielefeld University Library, Germany) Efficient dissemination and visibility of research results across scientific communication infrastructure boundaries is closely linked to the definition of standards for the description of scientific information and communication protocols. Metadata should ...
What kind of jungle is made up of national and international policies, services and infrastructures of open science? Can this jungle be defined, and can you survive it? The OpenAIRE event, Making sense of Open Science jungle – optimizing your use of Open Science services, was looking for answers to the above questions in Paasitorni, Helsinki on 12 March 2019. The event was organised by the Helsink...
The workshop was held at the University of Helsinki at the end of August. The event was designed to paint a broad picture of the current scene of Open Science starting from the European level down to local university level developments. The focus was clearly on infrastructures supporting the goals of Open Science but there was also a strong emphasis on networking between all participants. This asp...
