More open science through updated funding
Opening science and research in an economically sustainable way requires updating the existing funding mechanisms for science and research. Updated funding can pave the way for researchers and research organisations towards more open science and solve challenges presented by openness.
english translation Marko saajanaho
Open science is becoming part of a researcher’s everyday life, but twists and turns still remain on the road forward. Many challenges researchers encounter when opening their research relate to funding and resourcing. Perhaps the researcher wants to openly publish their article but is unable to afford the handling fee worth thousands of euros. They would gladly create open learning materials but fear they would have to do this in their own time. The researcher would like to open the research data they have gathered but is unsure how the business funding their research would react.
In October, the national level open science coordination published a roadmap in response to the funding challenges of open science. The goal of the roadmap is to offer different operators in the higher education and research community adequate, unambiguous, and interoperable methods and guidelines to conduct open science and research and implement the required funding in an economically sustainable way.
The core idea of the roadmap is to update existing funding mechanisms for science, research, and higher education to better facilitate openness. The roadmap is divided into six recommendations, whose themes are as follows:
- A coordinated operating environment for open research
- Funding and maintaining infrastructures
- Funding research publication
- Openness practices for research financiers
- Open science operation in research organisations
- Funding external to the research community
Fixing the foundations
An individual researcher’s job to open up their science becomes easier if different research organisations operate under the same ground rules regarding matters of open science. Instead of overlapping and incompatible separate solutions, open science requires a coordinated operating environment to facilitate openness. That is why the roadmap recommends considering openness as one of the factors in national structures that widely affect research organisations, such as the vision for higher education and research and the higher education funding model.
An essential factor when creating a coordinated operating environment is to ensure certain infrastructures important for openness are in place – for example, sustainably funded archives in which researchers can store their research data and publications. It is also to the researcher’s benefit that different infrastructures are developed systematically so that, for example, information about data or learning materials opened by the researcher are immediately visible in the research system. For developing infrastructures, the roadmap recommends a permanent operational structure involving the different parties funding and managing their respective openness infrastructures.
One important and specific question is how funding allocated to open research publication would support a more diverse publication field. Instead of APC fees going to major publishing companies, many researchers would prefer to see this money benefitting small, open publishing channels struggling to stay afloat through their colleagues’ volunteer work. Because non-profit publishers are usually organisations within the research community, such as learned societies, their cost structure can be more transparent. This makes managing research publication costs easier. As such, the roadmap recommends operators in the research community co-operate to determine the principles and methods for promoting the diversity and economic sustainability of open research publication.
Financiers and research organisations facilitating openness
To financial backers of research projects, the roadmap offers a self-evaluation tool that defines the minimum practices for facilitating openness and recommends more challenging practices. A financier monitoring the tool openly states funding application criteria. In addition, the financier recommends and, at more challenging levels, even requires project funding recipients to, for example, open their peer-reviewed research articles and engage in social influencing through methods such as scientific communication. Furthermore, the financier commits to compensate any expenses incurred by their requirements to the funding recipient.
In addition to project funding, researchers need concrete support from research organisations to facilitate open science. The road map urges research organisations to develop and maintain their own open science services by, for example, offering training and advice on opening research data, publications, and learning materials. The roadmap does not specifically list the services recommended to research organisations because these have already outlined in the previously published Open Science and Research Reference Architecture.
One significant obstacle to the advancement of open science is lack of time – who would want to create open learning materials and online courses or provide open publications if these have to be done at night? This is why the roadmap urges research organisations to ensure their staff are able to use their working hours to facilitate open science and research, should they wish to do so.
Forwards through co-operation
Usable money is always limited, so co-operation is often necessary when utilising resources. The roadmap outlines forms of co-operation between research organisations, the smallest of which is sharing open science expertise or various materials via networks. At their most extensive, these can be shared science, research, and learning platforms, systems, or support services.
Research organisations also engage in open science co-operation with other operators. These can be operators in the research community such as learned societies, or private sector, public administration, or third sector operators outside the community. Co-operation opportunities can be found in, for example, gathering research data or designing open learning materials. The roadmap emphasises the reciprocity of co-operation, and small operators in particular should be offered concrete support such as financial rewards or utilisation of the services of a research organisation.
One important form of co-operation described in the roadmap is an operator outside the research community offering money or other resources to produce research, learning materials, or teaching services. Although this funding operator may be restricted from opening the products resulting from co-operation due to business secrets or other reasons, at least limited opening can often be possible. In addition, opening might benefit the funding operator by creating new partnerships, for example. Naturally, the researcher, teacher, or research organisation working with the financier should inform them of such benefits.
Where does the roadmap lead?
In the best-case scenario, implementing the roadmap will make Finland an even more attractive destination for conducting research. A researcher can publish their results openly through several different channels, not all of which require handling fees – and even if a publishing channel does request a reasonable fee, the researcher knows their project funding can cover it. They can adapt their research results into open learning materials during their working hours. The researcher has also received help from their own organisation on how to negotiate opening research data with the business funding the research.
The roadmap offers path markers towards changing research culture. Now, all that remains to be done is to adopt the roadmap’s recommendations at the national and organisational levels and thus create a more open future for science.
Sources:
Open Science and Research Coordination. 2025. Roadmap for the Funding of Open Science and Research.
UNESCO. 2021. Recommendation on Open Science.
