Open science infrastructures refer to shared research infrastructures (virtual or physical, including major scientific equipment or sets of instruments, knowledge-based resources such as collections, journals and open access publication platforms, repositories, archives and scientific data, current research information systems, open bibliometrics and scientometrics systems for assessing and analysing scientific domains, open computational and data manipulation service infrastructures that enable collaborative and multidisciplinary data analysis and digital infrastructures) that are needed to support open science and serve the needs of different communities. 

Open labs, open science platforms and repositories for publications, research data and source codes, software forges and virtual research environments, and digital research services, in particular those that allow to identify unambiguously scientific objects by persistent unique identifiers (e.g. DOI, Handle, ORCID, ROR), are among the critical components of open science infrastructures, which provide essential open and standardized services to manage and provide access, portability, analysis and federation of data, scientific literature, thematic science priorities or community engagement.

• Open science infrastructures are often the result of community-building efforts, which are crucial for their long-term sustainability and therefore should be not-for-profit and guarantee permanent and unrestricted access to all public to the largest extent possible.
• Encourage as far as possible, the use of open-source software and source code.
• Open science infrastructures could be supported by direct funding and through an earmarked percentage of each funded grant.

The ambition of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to provide European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data and all other digital objects produced along the research life cycle (e.g., methods, software and publications), tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes. The EOSC is recognized by the Council of the European Union among the 20 actions of the ERA policy agenda 2022-2024 with the specific objective to deepen open science practices in Europe. Full deployment of the EOSC will lead to higher research productivity, new insights, and innovations, as well as improved reproducibility and trust in science. Information Society Development Institute is the mandated EOSC organization in Moldova.

The National Strategy for the Development of the Digital Moldova Information Society 2020 includes the Programme on the creation, development and capitalization of digital content: digital data centers / repositories for local content, development of open data portal, digitization of cultural and scientific heritage and providing access to it.

Open access scientific publications – journal articles, monographs and book chapters, research reports and conference papers, theses and dissertations – are disseminated by publishers on open access publishing platforms and/or deposited and made available in institutional, disciplinary, generic or national repositories, that are supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency or other well established not-for-profit organization devoted to common good and enabling open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability and long-term digital preservation and archiving. 

• Requiring immediate open access under an open content license, such as Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY)^[1].
• Favoring inclusive publishing and distribution channels that do not exclude authors on economic grounds, taking full advantage of repositories and open access journals that do not charge Article Processing Charges. The majority of publishers allow the author’s final version after peer-review but prior to publisher typesetting, also called the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM), to be deposited into a repository where it will be available open access, maximizing its visibility and impact.
• Embargo periods could be applied for specific types of works – e.g., theses or dissertations that include patentable discoveries.
• Depositing in a repository is linked with the individual or institutional evaluation of the research output – institutions consider as publications those whose metadata and full texts are deposited in the repository.
• Where possible, scientific outputs related to publications (e.g., research data, software, source code, source materials, workflows, and protocols) should also be made openly available in suitable repositories and linked to publications.

UNESCO Recommendation calls to prevent predatory publishing behaviours and promote high-quality and responsible research in line with the 2017 UNESCO Recommendation on Science and Scientific Researchers and explore the potential of open science practices to reduce scientific misconduct, including the fabrication and falsification of results, violation of scientific ethical norms, and plagiarism.

Any transfer or licensing of copyrights to third parties should not restrict the public’s right to immediate open access to scientific publications. Rights retention strategy from the cOAlition S – a group of national research funding organizations, with the support of the European Commission and the European Research Council, gives researchers the freedom to submit manuscripts for publication to their journal of choice, including subscription journals, whilst providing immediate open access via repositories.

12 institutions in Moldova already adopted open access policies and three – open science strategies, which serves a strong backbone for the national open science strategy. 12 institutions in Moldova have institutional repositories and others could use a shared repository Zenodo recommended by the European Commission. Major universities and research institutes in Moldova publish open access journals, organize joint campaigns to promote open access and open science among students and researchers, university staff and research managers, publishers, librarians, and the general public. The National Bibliometric Instrument (IBN) is the largest open access e-library of articles published in national scientific journals, as well as conference proceedings from the Republic of Moldova starting from 1993 to date. Code on Science and Innovation of the Republic of Moldova, approved in 2004, with amendments in 2018 (No. 259 of 15.07.2004) ensures free and non-discriminatory access to scientific and technological information resources (Articles 54, 57, 79 and 85).

The FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) will become the basis for research work. Several measures and methods need to be implemented in research and innovation projects to foster dissemination, communication, and exploitation of research outputs.
 

• Proper research data management in accordance with the FAIR principles, which means making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
• Researchers are required to Prepare a Data Management Plan and keep it updated throughout the course of the research project.
• Make data, needed to validate research results (e.g., presented in scientific publications), available via a trusted repository and provide open access to it under ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’ principle under an open content license, such as Creative Commons (CC BY or CC0^[1]).
• Make data needed for policy making and innovation in government and the private sector (e.g., geospatial, earth observation and environment, meteorological, statistics, mobility, productivity data and so on) available in open, machine-readable, accessible, findable, and re-usable formats under an open content license, such as Creative Commons (CC0).
• Provide information (via the same repository) about any research output or any other tools and instruments needed to re-use or validate the data.

There is no single, one-size-fits-all way to manage research data and make them FAIR. What is appropriate and feasible largely depends on the research domain and data type(s) involved, as well as on the specificities of the research projects.

Open research data include, among others, digital and analogue data, both raw and processed, and the accompanying metadata, as well as numerical scores, textual records, images and sounds, protocols, analysis code and workflows that can be openly used, reused, retained, and redistributed by anyone, subject to acknowledgement. Open research data are available in a timely and user-friendly, human- and machine-readable and actionable format, in accordance with principles of good data governance and stewardship, notably the FAIR principles, supported by regular curation and maintenance.

Access should be as open as possible and access restrictions need to be proportionate and justified (e.g., on the basis of the protection of human rights, national security, confidentiality, the right to privacy and respect for human subjects of study, legal process and public order, the protection of intellectual property rights, personal information, sacred and secret indigenous knowledge, and rare, threatened, or endangered species). Some data that is not openly available may nonetheless be shared among specific users according to defined data sharing agreements and access criteria made by local, national or regional pertinent governing instances. Tools and protocols for pseudonymizing and anonymizing data, as well as systems for mediated access, could facilitate data availability, so that as much data as possible can be shared as appropriate.

• Commitment to responsible and fair research assessment that considers the intrinsic merit of the work, not the title of the journal or publisher, when research outputs are assessed.
  • This commitment is aligned with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics. DORA offers a very useful collection of case studies on reimagining academic assessment from universities and national consortia highlighting key elements of institutional change to improve academic career assessment. (read more….)
• Conclusions on research assessment and implementation of open science from the Council of the European Union acknowledge that research assessment systems should focus on quality and impact and stressed that research assessment should include other research outcomes and processes than quantitative journal- and publication-based indicators and the evaluation of a narrow range of research outputs and promote early knowledge sharing and collaboration to accelerate the implementation of open science policies and practices.
  • Applying open science principles should be appropriately rewarded in researchers’ careers.

• The evolution of the research assessment systems in Europe should be guided by the following principles, while respecting the autonomy of research institutions and the freedom of scientific research, as well as the diversity of national and disciplinary contexts, and considering their consistency with international initiatives:
• Moving to a more balanced approach between the quantitative and the qualitative evaluation of research, by strengthening the qualitative research assessment indicators while developing the responsible use of quantitative indicators;
• Recognizing all forms of research and innovation output and processes, including inter alia, FAIR datasets, software, codes, methodologies, protocols, and patents, and not only publications;
• Taking into consideration diverse career pathways and all research and innovation activities, including mentoring, leadership roles, entrepreneurship, data management, teaching, knowledge valorization, industry-academia cooperation, support for evidence informed policy making, interaction with society, including citizen science and public engagement;
• Taking into consideration the specificities of the various research disciplines, the range from basic to applied research, the stages of research careers and the missions of research institutions;
• Ensuring that ethics and integrity are accorded the highest priority and are not compromised by counter-incentives;
• Ensuring diversity, gender equality, and actively promoting women in science.
• UNESCO Recommendation encourages multilingualism in the practice of science, in scientific publications and in academic communications, building on the Helsinki initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication that promotes language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems, making sure that in the process of expert-based evaluation, high quality research is valued regardless of the publishing language or publication channel and when metrics-based systems are utilized, journal and book publications in all languages are adequately taken into account.

Reforming research assessment is one of the actions in the ERA Policy Agenda for 2022-2024. The new global Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment are the key drivers of the research assessment reform in Europe. CoARA includes research funding and research performing organizations, national/regional assessment authorities and agencies, learned societies that will work together to enable systemic reform on the basis of common principles within an agreed timeframe. Moldova State University is one of the signatories and will participate in exchanges of information and mutual learning between all those willing to improve research assessment practices.

Peer review is central to quality and open peer review is one of the innovative approaches that is being promoted, as appropriate, including possible disclosure of the identity of the reviewers, publicly available reviews, and the possibility for a broader community to provide comments and participate in the assessment process. 

For example, Open Research Europe – an open access publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding – enables rapid sharing of research results and insights and facilitates open, constructive research discussion. Submission undergoes a comprehensive set of prepublication checks to ensure that all policies and ethical guidelines are adhered to and once the article has passed the prepublication checks, a fully typeset version is published with a DOI, enabling immediate viewing and citation, as well as indexing in Google Scholar. Open Research Europe believes that transparency in the peer review process is crucial for quality and accountability, which makes it easier to know if research can be trusted, and open peer review:

• Enables conversation within the research community with fully transparent peer review;
• Reduces the possibility of bias, as everything is openly available to all;
• Improves the quality of peer review;
• Let everyone benefit and learn from reading reviewer feedback;
• Accelerates the pace of discovery by publishing research before it undergoes peer review.

Articles that pass peer review are sent to major indexing databases and repositories.

UNESCO Recommendation also calls to promote open science from the outset of the research process and extend the principles of openness in all stages of the scientific process to improve quality and reproducibility, including the encouragement of community-driven collaboration and other innovative models, for example preprints, clearly distinguished from final peer-reviewed publications, and respecting the diversity of scientific practices, in order to accelerate dissemination and encourage rapid growth in scientific knowledge. More and more universities and funders strongly encourage researchers to post preprints – completed authors manuscripts – under a CC BY license on a preprint platform/open access repository and prominently state whether or not they have undergone peer review.