Open science – in focus for Sweden in the EU

President’s blog 17 May, 2023

At the end of last week, Academia Europaea and the Wenner-Gren Foundations held an important joint three-day conference on the theme “Publishing in Academia – Digital Challenges”. Unfortunately, I only had the opportunity to attend the last day of the conference, when I participated in an interesting panel on the increasing costs of open publishing from the perspective of university management – a growing problem that universities have to grapple with.

The topic came up again when the National Library of Sweden, the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Swedish Research Council, VA – Public & Science and others yesterday inaugerated a two-day conference on the theme “Open Science – from Policy to Practice”, within the framework of Sweden’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. The conference was opened, apart from the organizers, by State Secretary Maria Nilsson, who spoke about the Swedish proposal for the Council of the European Union’s conclusions on open science, which is expected to be decided already next week, on 23 May. A first keynote, by Hanne Monclair, from the UNESCO Open Science Steering Committee, presented UNESCO’s recommendations on open science which form an overall framework also for the EU’s work. I took part in a panel about the Council’s conclusions, which really paves the way for going from politics to practice in terms of open science – this is also noted by LERU (the League of European Research Universities), which scrutinizes political developments critically, in its comments. LERU points out that this proposal for Council Conclusions is aimed at the researchers and the research community.

I also participated in a panel on EOSC – the European Open Science Cloud – which is under strong and exciting development and will become an extremely important resource for open research data for the future. Even here, however, there is reason to listen to LERU, which advocates stronger incentives on the part of the European Commission to promote collaboration between the two main stakeholders: EOSC itself, on behalf of the Commission, and the research performers – mainly universities and colleges. Here it is quite clear that in-depth cooperation is required – not least more commitment from universities and colleges. The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions’ roadmap for open science recommends all Swedish higher education institutions to consider joining the EOSC Association in 2023 – this in order to be able to participate more actively and have the opportunity to influence future developments.

One session was devoted to citizen science – an integral part of the transition to open science which has tended to be a bit neglected in favour of open access to publications and research data. This time the conference participants received an overall and broad update on citizen science with several interesting national examples.

“Open science” is no longer a side issue that can be ignored. As several of the participants emphasized, “open” ought to be a redundant specification soon. In short, it is about science – and about its conditions, where openness, transparency and reproducibility are necessary components.

Astrid Söderbergh Widding
President