New policy RUB pledges its commitment to Open Science

A number of RUB departments have long been committed to Open Science in order to make the scientific process as transparent as possible. On the initiative of the institutions that are most closely involved, the RUB Senate adopted a university-wide Open Science Policy in June 2022. In it, the university officially pledges to remove financial, technical or legal obstacles wherever possible in order to facilitate free access to science.

This includes

• Open educational resources, i.e. open access to educational material produced at the university,
• Open access, i.e. unrestricted access to scientific literature, and
• Open research data, i.e. the disclosure of scientific data so that other groups can reproduce it and make secondary use of it.

“Open science is a trend in academia, and many funding organisations expect it to be implemented,” says Peter Salden, head of the Centre for Teaching and Learning, who coordinated the Open Science working group at RUB. “It is a vital initiative that benefits all scholars and the university as an institution. We want to share the results of our scientific work.”

Open educational resources

The aim of open educational resources (OER) is to allow educational materials to be reproduced, distributed and reused free of charge. The Centre for Teaching and Learning at RUB provides advice in this regard. With the state portal ORCA.nrw, RUB also operates a platform on which OER materials from all universities in North Rhine-Westphalia can be accessed.

Open research data

RUB recommends sharing research data in the public domain to an appropriate extent at the earliest possible stage. The Research Data Management working group at the University Library and IT.SERVICES advises researchers on creating data management plans and selecting suitable publication platforms. It also builds its own infrastructure on which research data can be stored and made publicly accessible.

Open access

Through open access (OA) publications, scientific findings are freely accessible instead of ending up behind a paywall. As early as 2013, RUB adopted an OA resolution, which has been updated in the Open Science Policy, and recommends either publishing research results directly in OA or additionally depositing them on a document server. The University Library provides advice in this regard. It manages the RUB publication fund, provides publication platforms and operates the RUB document repository. More information can be found online.