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In October 2020, CHIST-ERA releases its Open Science Policy Statement, which summarises its strong engagements for a more efficient and transparent excellent science.

The Statement is reproduced below and in the attachment.

CHIST-ERA Open Science Policy Statement

An Engagement towards Efficient, Transparent and Universal Science

1. Why Open Science?

Science is one of those few concepts that surpasses any subjective considerations. It is a universal institution that must be constantly challenged, tested or even reproduced in different conditions. In order to ensure its optimal transmission that lead to new results and discoveries, open availability of research results, free of charge for the user, must be ensured, improving by the same means transparency, reproducibility, visibility and democratisation of research.

2. Our commitments

Since its inception, CHIST-ERA has been a vector of scientific excellence throughout. We are aware of the importance of the fundamentals of Open Science. We are aware of the already existing Open Science good practices of researchers supported by CHIST-ERA. We are also aware of the Open Science landscape (funders, research organisations, etc.) in Europe, which is still in transformation. Therefore, CHIST-ERA is committed to implement the best Open Science practices transnationally, and accompany, foster and trigger the efforts towards Open Science in Europe. Open Science calls for changes at the level of all the research stakeholders. We are aware of the complexity and vested interests of moving away from a system where publication paywalls hinder the proper functioning of Science. We are aware of the difficulty of freeing research assessment from the use of wrong proxies (like impact factors). We are therefore committed to continuously refine our evaluation procedures starting from the principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment1 (DORA).

3. Implementation

We are convinced that the research landscape is mature enough to allow for a widespread application of the best Open Science principles and practices. We want to participate in shaping the future of the European Open Science landscape by developing an overarching Open Science policy that encompasses national/regional practices. Concretely, we want by 2023/2024, 100% of the publications produced by CHIST-ERA projects to be in Open Access and 100% of the underlying research data to be open2 following the FAIR data principles. The modalities will be made precise in the Open Science policy to be released in the last quarter of 2020.

1 https://sfdora.org

2 "As open as possible", see the full CHIST-ERA Open Science policy for more details