As highlighted in the “UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science”, adopted in November 2021, Open Science is grounded on the same values that inspire IIT, namely quality and integrity of research, diversity and inclusiveness, equity and fairness, and collective benefit. Moreover, to be really open and valuable, Science must be documented and supported by properly managed and, whenever possible, openly shared data.

In this framework, most funding agencies introduced strict requirements for open sharing of the results that stem out of the funded projects. The manuscripts of scientific articles must be available in open access, as well as the data and all other research products, which must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for humans and machines, namely FAIR.

For these reasons and for its vocation to innovation, during the last years IIT significantly potentiated the Open Science and Research Data Management support services for researchers. This is the result of the collaboration of Research Organization, Information and Communication Technology and Legal Affairs Directorates.

The most important phase of the research data lifecycle is planning. For a few years, almost all funding agencies have required to deliver a detailed Data Management Plan (DMP) at the beginning of each research project. IIT provides to its scientists a professional support to DMP writing, which includes guidelines and tailored, discipline-specific templates. Given that this requires several and diversified competences, we created a support working group for DMP writing, involving IT, legal, technology transfer professionals, and data curators.

Since a few years, IIT has adopted an internal Information Security policy that guides researchers in data protection depending on the risk classification: in particular, personal data handling must be done in line with relevant laws and regulations. Therefore, IIT provides both IT and legal support to researchers for the correct management of personal and high-risk data. Moreover, RDM support has been working on workflows and procedures for the collection of metadata and documentation enabling data reuse, as well as tailored storage and backup solutions for different volumes and types of data.

IIT has joined the main national transformative agreements that support the transition towards an open-access scholarly publishing model. Moreover, IIT has set up its own institutional research data repository, IIT Dataverse. This tool allows to share data according to the FAIR principles, to make them citable and link them to scientific articles by assigning digital persistent identifiers. IIT Dataverse is one of the first Italian instances of Dataverse, a web application developed by Harvard University and adopted by many Universities and Research Performing Organizations around the globe. IIT Dataverse is catalogued in re3data.org, it is integrated with OpenAIRE Explore and it is compliant with the definition of “trusted repository”, as defined by the European Commission in Horizon Europe Open Science guidelines. IIT RDM support has produced several guidelines and procedures to help researchers in the correct data sharing either in IIT Dataverse or in other repositories.

News and Events