Open Science is endorsed and actively encouraged by many research funding institutions. This particularly applies in the field of Open Access. In the EU, Open Science is promoted by the European Commission through funding programmes. There are also many promotional activities by national governments and research organisations.

Here you will find a summary of information about the Open Science activities of the EU and activities in Germany. The Open Science Overview in Europe from the OpenAIRE project is one starting point for the activities in other European countries.

European Commission

The aim of the European activities is to make Open Access and Open Data the standard in publicly financed European research projects (and in the member states). Open Access is funded by the European Commission within the scope of the current funding programme for research and innovation Horizon Europe and its preceding programme Horizon 2020. The Open Science policy in Horizon Europe stipulates Open Access publications and Open Science principles throughout the entire programme. A factsheet: Open Science in Horizon Europe gives an overview of the new funding programme. For the research data of EU-funded projects, there is an obligation to consider the FAIR principles (including submitting corresponding data management plans) and to make the data available as Open Data, as long as there are no interests worthy of protection.

Key projects of the European Commission are:

• The realisation of a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) that, in conjunction with national metadata-bases, will form an upstream digital infrastructure for publishing, collecting, finding and using European research data and will be intensively prepared in different pilot projects (EU projects such as eEOSC, GO FAIR, openAIRE).
• With Open Research Europe, the EU Commission offers an Open Access publication platform for the publication of results from EU-sponsored projects (such as Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe) for all scientific disciplines.
  Open-Science-Förderung in Deutschland

Open Science funding in Germany

German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / DFG)

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft / DFG)) regularly promotes Open Science with a variety of measures. It has established the Funding Programme for Open Access Publication Costs, which pays the author’s fees that are levied when articles are published in Open Access journals. Furthermore, it supports the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a reference tool for high quality Open Access journals and, with its infrastructure funding, makes an important contribution to the handling of research data, such as by supporting the establishment or extension of data repositories.

The DFG has published the following information and guidelines on Open Science:

• The paper “Open Science as Part of Research Culture” bundles positions of the DFG on Open Science.
• The position paper “Academic Publishing as a Foundation and Area of Leverage for Research Assessment: Challenges and Fields of Action” (PDF) addresses current challenges in scientific publishing such as market structures, business models and publication fraud, and identifies corresponding areas for action.
• The paper “Funding Information Infrastructures for Research. A DFG Strategy Paper (March 2018)” (PDF), presents its position on Open Access and research data, among other things.
• The DFG has summarised further information on Open Access on its website.
• Regarding research data, the DFG has published Guidelines on Handling Research Data.
• In its Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice Open Science is for example referenced in “Guideline 13: Providing public access to research results”.
• The DFG also operates the portal “Research Integrity” in which researchers can find out about the guidelines and annotations, including subject-specific comments, case examples, FAQs as well as further information.

Federal Ministry of Education and Research

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung / BMBF) supports Open Access through regulatory and funding measures. The funding measures include the fact that funds for Open Access fees can also be raised via the BMBF retrospectively. In a regulatory sense, the accessibility of publications is supported with the introduction of an “indispensable secondary publication right for authors of scientific articles”. According to this legal basis, researchers can make their journal articles publicly accessible after a period of twelve months. Furthermore, the BMBF supports research into the participation of non-scientists (Citizen Science) in research projects.

The BMBF has published the following information on Open Science:

• The Open Access strategy (German) for Germany, presents the promotion of various Open Access routes (green and gold Open Access) by the BMBF.
• In its Action Plan Research Data (German) the BMBF has defined measures to strengthen data sovereignty and data infrastructures.
• You can find further information from the BMBF on Open Access on the BMBF websites Bildung-Forschung.digital (German) and Open Access – Wissen für alle (German).