Open science and research leads to surprising discoveries and creative insights (2014), Ministry of Education and Culture

What is this about?

The Open science and research leads to surprising discoveries and creative insights (2014) strategy, published by Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture in Finnish and English, is a national resource providing guidance for researchers, institutions, funders, publishers, and policymakers. It establishes openness as the default in research, following the maxim “as open as possible, as closed as necessary,” while balancing ethical, privacy, intellectual property, and security concerns. The document connects open science with higher research quality, reproducibility, faster knowledge transfer, and fairer access, especially for communities with limited subscription options. It outlines key practices such as open access publishing, Creative Commons licensing, persistent identifiers, repository deposition, FAIR data principles, and data management plans that define stewardship, metadata, and repository selection. Roles and responsibilities are specified: authors retain rights and acknowledge funding; institutions provide training and repositories; funders support infrastructure; publishers ensure rights, interoperability, and machine-readable metadata. Embargoes and sensitive data restrictions are permitted only with transparent justification, supported by governance mechanisms such as ethics oversight and data access committees. Infrastructure like repositories, registries, and discovery services ensures compliance and visibility, while assessment emphasizes the quality of openness—metadata, persistent links, transparent methods, and, where appropriate, data and code sharing. The strategy reduces ambiguity, aligns national practice with international norms, and serves as both a benchmark for policy and a practical checklist for researchers.

For whom is this important?

All stakeholders in research

Other information