Open science and research

Open access publishing

Aalto University has an Open Access Policy (see attachment), and instruction page regarding open access.  Aalto University requires that researchers make their peer reviewed  scientific publications openly available, in the form permitted by publishers, at its ACRIS research information system.

According to the decision by Vice President of Research (Increasing the number of green open access publications, 3rd of May, 2018), the opening of final accepted manuscripts (FAM) is carried out by research service personnel (see attachment).

The duties of the researcher are:

• The researcher shall ensure his or her co-author´s consent for parallel publishing in Aalto University’s repository, and
• The researcher shall send the final accepted manuscript to [email protected] at the time of the acceptance of the publication.

The metadata of publications is harvested from ACRIS to OpenAIRE. OpenAIRE provides open access infrastructure for research in Europe.

Most of the PhD dissertations are published openly and the full-text can be found in Aalto's institutional repository Aaltodoc.

Research services monitors the openness of publications and actively provides information on open access publications and their costs to departments and schools.

Research data management (RDM) and open and FAIR data

Aalto University's research data management policy defines the principles for opening up research data created with public funding, in order to ensure that it has a wide impact for the benefit of the society and achieves the strategic goals of Aalto University.

We are in the process of renewing Aalto's data policy as a part of our strategy process in 2019 and focus on opening software code and methods. We will follow the definitions and principles of the Public Sector Information Reuse Directive. Article 10.1 states: Member States shall support the availability of research data by adopting national policies and relevant actions aiming at making publicly funded research data openly available ('open access policies'), following the principle of “open by default” and compatible with the FAIR principles. In that context, concerns relating to intellectual property rights, personal data protection and confidentiality, security and legitimate commercial interests, shall be taken into account in accordance with the principle of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.

One of the five high-level goals of Aalto Digital 2022 project is opening up research data and harnessing digital platforms for collaboration and multidisciplinarity.

See our Research Data Management pages and Aalto University's research data management policy (see attachment).

Research information management system ACRIS is Aalto's metadata catalogue. We are aiming at harvesting data from international repositories to ACRIS and transferring the information to the national Fairdata services.

Please, note that even though you cannot open your research data in open repositories, you are required to register the metadata of your research data to ACRIS. Small datasets can also be deposited to ACRIS since we can assign DOIs.

Combining openness and commercialization

Before initiating any publishing activity it’s essential to map and carefully consider  potential exploitation options, because once the result becomes known to public, it’s no longer possible to protect it by patenting (or as a trade secret).
 
In addition, any applicable funding terms need to be obeyed, and funding organization may require open access publishing. Open access publishing is one of the goals of Aalto University. We have developed our process of commercialization in a way that open access publishing can be achieved after the necessary steps needed for the early stages of commercialization, such as filing patent applications, is done. Timing and operations done in proper manner are the keys in achieving both the publishing and the goals of commercialization.

• Read more about commercialization and intellectual property (IP) from the documents attached below.

Inventions resulting from research can be patented, protected with registered design or with a registered trademark. After the necessary intellectual property registrations are filed, the related scientific publications can be published using open access publishing models. Results such as software can be double licensed, that is, published with a license that allows use for non-commercial users and separate licensing for commercial uses.

Commercialization process can benefit from using open access tools and open access publishing strategies to attract customers. Collaboration using open source licensed software can be a base for the competitive advantage that provides income to a company.

• Read about business strategies that use openness as a tool from the document Open Source Publishing in Business attached below.