The Open Science (OS) is a set of principles, goals, and best practices aimed at ensuring the openness of all aspects of the scientific research process, in order to increase its efficiency and make scientific knowledge findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. In this context, scientific progress and the impact of discoveries are accelerated to benefit the common good.

The most immediate applications of Open Science include disseminating research through open access publications, sharing data and research methods, and offering and using open infrastructures. This means providing public access to all scientific products (publications, data, lab notes, recordings, software, algorithms, protocols, workflows, models), allowing their reuse and redistribution.

Open Science is a dynamic concept that has progressively expanded to include Citizen Science, Open Education, and Open Innovation.

INRiM and Open Science

Since 2020, INRiM has had a working group dedicated to promoting the adoption of Open Science practices.

The group’s objectives are to:

• Propose strategies for implementing Open Science principles, in collaboration with external institutions that promote these principles;
• Define, organize, and support activities for the promotion, support, training, and awareness of Open Science;
• Update INRiM policies on Open Science and verify their implementation;
• Oversee the deposit, validation, rights management, and publication of scientific products in the METRICA Institutional Repository (IRIS/Cineca);
• Develop operational guidelines to assist scientific staff and provide advice on copyright management;
• Suggest guidelines for signing editorial subscription contracts for bibliographic resources of interest to INRiM, in accordance with the principles of Open Access and Open Science;
• Provide tools for the proper management of research data by individual researchers/technologists.