On May 9 and 10, 2022, the HES-SO Open Science Days were held at the Institut et Haute Ecole de la Santé La Source. Organized by the Event working group of the HES-SO Open Science Community – with the support of the Research & Innovation department – these days offered workshops and conferences on the central issues of Open data and Open access.
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Make research a public good
With more than 130 participants from the different universities and fields of the HES‑SO, the Open Science Days allowed rich exchanges between the various actors involved in the major turning point represented by this new way of doing science. research and present the results. The national Open science strategy, followed by the HES‑SO, provides that 100% of scientific publications resulting from research financed by public funds will be available in Open Access by 2024. It also requires that all research data be accessible as widely as possible. The desire to make research a public good, to democratize knowledge, is at the heart of this paradigm shift.
Open science, a project at the crossroads of various professions
These days, one devoted to Open Data and the other to Open Access, highlighted the huge task of putting Open Science into practice. This requires the acquisition of new knowledge and skills not only for researchers but also for the other actors involved directly or indirectly: research support services, legal services, IT and libraries.
Doing Open Science now requires planning the management of the entire life cycle of research data, respecting the main legal principles of data protection, being able to anonymize or pseudonymize its data sets, to face the problems ethics, to exchange information in complete security, to find the right data archiving infrastructure as well as the right path to Open Access among all those offered by the various journals, to escape predatory publishers or even to be able to negotiate its rights against publishers and the list goes on and on.
The major challenges of Open Science for the HES-SO
For the Vice-Rector Research and Innovation, Christine Pirinoli, the great challenge of Open Science for an institution as complex as the HES-SO is twofold. On the one hand, it is a question of succeeding in pooling the resources, knowledge and infrastructures of these different professional bodies located in 28 higher education establishments spread over seven cantons. And, on the other hand, to take into account the very varied disciplinary cultures so that Open Science can be applied in all coherence. The results of the two Days are extremely positive. They allowed the preliminary exchanges essential to face these challenges head-on.
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