Recently, the Government approved the order «On approval of the national plan for open science». The event is not very noticeable to the general public, but it is long-awaited for the Ukrainian academic community, and even more so for the team of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Oleksandr Berezko, President of Eurodoc, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Associate Professor at the Department of Social Communications and Information Activities, Lviv Polytechnic, Head of the University Web Services Support and Development Unit, writes about this in his article for ZN.UA «Open science – a second chance for the Ukrainian scientific system?».
What is open science?
For the first time, I heard the term «open science» in April 2017 in Oslo at the annual conference of Eurodoc, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers, fully dedicated to this issue. The desire to discuss this topic was quite logical: a year before, the European Commission presented its updated vision «Open innovation, open science and openness to the world», which needed to be comprehended and learned to implement.
In the draft amendments to the Law of Ukraine «On Scientific and Scientific-Technical Activity», published by the Ministry of Education and Culture in October 2021, there is a rather voluminous definition, which can be summarized as follows: open science is not some «new» or «special» science, which denies the existing, but rather, a more open approach to the organization of scientific processes and the dissemination of knowledge, aimed at the development of cooperation between researchers and society.
Open science is also interpreted as an umbrella term for a number of diverse practices, including: opening access to scientific articles (open access) and experimental data (open data); publication of scientific publication reviews, sometimes indicating the names of the reviewers (open review); explanation of research results to the general public and involvement of its representatives (non-scientists) in scientific activity (citizen science).
Why open science in Ukraine?
Since the European Commission made a bet on openness in science and innovation, the emergence of relevant mandatory requirements in EU scientific grant programs, in particular in Horizon Europe, the main one of them, has become natural. In principle, the very need to meet these requirements is sufficient motivation for the introduction of open science in Ukraine and the development of the corresponding National Plan – an important European integration tool.