Webinar 4 | Open Science

Open Science has been established as a key priority by policy actors at national, regional and international level (e.g. ministries of higher education and research; European Commission; UNESCO), with the ambitions to improve the quality and impact of the knowledge being produced while at the same time changing research practices both in terms of knowledge production and dissemination. This growing commitments to Open Science has led to an increasing amount of debates within the higher education sector on how to achieve this openness as well as incentives for universities and higher education stakeholders more widely to propose solutions to meet ambitious expectations regarding: Open access to research data, processes, outputs and publications to make them more widely available and guaranteeing more fluid circulation across the research landscape and for relevant stakeholders outside of academia; Collaborations across universities globally and with industry and civil society; Management and protection of research data. Despite these commitments, there remains debates on the type of regulations that should be established defining the degree of Openness that should be promoted in order to find a balance between accessibility and protection of research data and researchers, and the type of support and training required for university communities as a whole (students, academic, managerial administrative staff) to achieve these ambitious objectives.