UOC to take part in European Commission open science meetings

The European Commission (EC) is organizing a series of meetings in March to take stock of member states' application of open science policies. It has invited a number of stakeholders to discuss the latest developments in open science. As a benchmark in fostering open knowledge, the UOC has been invited to take part in the seminar.

There will be a follow-up of practices undertaken in Europe to make scientific research more transparent, inclusive and open to the whole of society. The meetings will be attended by organizations operating in this area, such as academic institutions, funding bodies, citizen science organizations, publishers, open science platforms and libraries.

The first meeting, with National Points of Reference on Scientific Information (NPR), will discuss initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a virtual environment for hosting and processing all open science data, services and tools generated in Europe, and the European COVID-19 Data Platform, launched to facilitate data sharing and analysis in order to accelerate coronavirus research.

The second meeting, scheduled for 18 March, will focus on the current challenges in research assessment and its link to open science, and will analyse the need for more integrated and qualitative assessment in academic careers and the role of metrics in assessment systems, amongst other matters.

UOC Vice President for Globalization and Cooperation, Pastora Martínez Samper, will be taking part in both meetings, which are attended by invitation only. Participating in the research assessment block, Martínez will explain the aim of the UOC's Open Knowledge Action Plan and the action taken by the University thus far in regard to assessment models. She will also discuss whether current criteria are sufficient and appropriate, and address the challenges in assessing university-generated research.

The UOC’s Open Knowledge Action Plan

In 2018, the UOC began implementing its action plan to make the knowledge generated at the University openly accessible. The plan aims to open the University in terms of co-creating and sharing knowledge in order to become an open, global knowledge hub and thus make a decisive contribution to meeting the challenges established in the United Nations 2030 Agenda.


Open science began to gain importance in Europe back in 2015, when the report Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World was published under the then EC Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas. Since then, member states and the European Commission itself, along with a number of public and private funding bodies, have put a series of policies and initiatives into operation to foster open science. These are slowly showing results and sparking changes that enable knowledge to be shared more openly.