Where is Open Science in Horizon Europe?
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In the EU Framework programme for Research & Innovation Horizon 2020, open science was almost reduced to open access. Although Horizon Europe is a continuation of its predecessor programme, it integrates a more complete approach to the open science concept.

Open science is evaluated both in the “Excellence” (quality of open science practices, data management) and in the “Quality and efficiency of implementation” (expertise, list of relevant publications) criteria. Horizon Europe distinguishes between mandatory and recommended open science practices. However, integrating not only mandatory but also recommended practices becomes necessary to obtain a high evaluation score (“proposers are expected to adopt when possible and appropriate for their projects”. Horizon Europe Programme Guide).

Summary of open science practices in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe:

TABLE TABLE TABLE

Further Open Science instruments

Open Research Europe - ORE
ORE is an open access - open peer-reviewed publication platform (and not a repository), funded and managed by the EU Commission for publications from EU-funded projects (current and former) in all scientific disciplines. The use of Open Research Europe is not obligatory for EU-funded research projects, but enables automatic compliance with the Open Access requirements (as well as the open peer-review and early sharing recommended practices) with no author fees. Submissions are published immediately as a preprint (under a CC-BY license) after a formal review and then evaluated by external peer reviewers, whereby both the evaluations and the names of the reviewers are publicly accessible (open peer review).

European Open Science Cloud - EOSC
EOSC is the EU initiative to progress on FAIR principles which has been developed since 2016. According to the official definition the EOSC is the “envisioned federation of research (data) infrastructures that will enable the Web of FAIR Data and Services and help researchers to perform Open Science and open up and exploit their data, publications and code. According to its strategic plan, its vision is to support the full cycle of workflows for scientific research from 2023 (EOSC SRIA, Version 1.0 - 21 June 2021).

Official (re)sources of European Commission:

The main official documents on open science are:

  • Definition of the obligations/mandatory practices: Model Grant Agreement MGA and Annotated Grant Agreement AGA (article 17, annex 5). As the Grant Agreement article is not as precise as in Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement, the main explanatory content on Open Science is to be found in the Annex 5
  • More explanations and recommendations on practices: Horizon Europe Programme Guide (with links to tools and examples), Proposal template
  • Evaluation criteria: Work Programme Annexes

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