This website is no longer being updated. Information on Open Science in Austria is available under
osa-openscienceaustria.at/en
The Universities Austria (UNIKO)-founded OSA – Open Science Austria initiative serves as the new national contact point for networking activities and information surrounding Open Science at Austrian universities.
The Open Science Network Austria (OANA) and its activities have been discontinued. We would like to thank everyone involved in OANA activities in the years 2012-2021 and everyone who supported the network's work towards Open Science.
About Open Science
This is an overview of some of the core elements of Open Science. The term Open Science describes the opening of research processes and scientific output in times of digitisation. Depending on the definition approach, Open Science can be split up into different elements. More detailed Open Science definitions can be found, for example, at Foster, Wikipedia or in the Foster Open Science Trainer Handbook.
Open Access to Publications
The term Open Access (OA) means unrestricted and free access to scientific information on the internet. This mainly concerns scientific publications, but also data and metadata, source texts and digital reproductions. Open Access demands that the outcomes of publicly funded research should also be publicly accessible to anyone interested in them. Open licenses enable further use and re-use.
Open Research Data
Open Research Data are data created in the course of scientific research (e.g. through digitisation, source studies, experiments, measurements, investigations or surveys) and provided openly, i.e. made available worldwide on the internet.
The data and their metadata should comply with the FAIR Data Principles, i.e. be "findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable".
Open Evaluation
Open Evaluation means openness in scientific evaluation through peer review and bibliometrics.
Open Peer Review is an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted to be in line with the aims of Open Science, including transparency about reviewer and author identities, the publication of review reports and the enablement of greater participation in the peer review process.
Open Metrics means openness of data, methods, and results of bibliometric analyses. The traceability and reusability of evaluation procedures opens up new possibilities in dealing with scientific findings in the fields of research, technology, and innovation.
Citizen Science
The term Citizen Science is defined in different ways across the globe. Österreich forscht points out the variety of definitions and defines the term in the following way: Citizen Science carries out scientific projects with the help of or completely by interested amateurs (lat. amator "lover"). The Citizen Scientists formulate research questions, report observations, carry out measurements, evaluate data, and/or write publications. Compliance with scientific criteria is a prerequisite. This does not only facilitate new scientific projects and new insights, but also enables a dialogue between science and society that is otherwise impossible or very difficult to achieve. An overview of the concepts and ideas can be found on the website Österreich forscht under "What is Citizen Science?"
>> Citizen Science Ressourcen (on the Österreich forscht platform)
Open Methodology
The term Open Methodology refers to opening up methods that are used by researchers to achieve scientific results and making them publicly available. Even though the description of methods is a core element of the research process, results based on these descriptions are often not comprehensible in detail and, even more importantly, not reproducible. The Open Methodology approach aims to counteract this problem.
One of the most established implementations of Open Methodology is the Open Source movement. Its goal is to make programming code publicly available in order to make results understandable and reproducible on the one hand, and to enable further development on the basis of existing code on the other.
Another rather widely-implemented approach is the use of Open Notebooks, in which daily research work is publicly documented. Other approaches to Open Methodology include Open Workflows (documented and transparent workflows) and Open Annotations (open and collaborative classifications and comments).
