Open Science and Open Data opens scientific literature and data to the public to increase integrity, transparency, reusability, and advancing humanity. Open Access publishing means scientific literature, journals and books, need to be openly available without a subscription to the journal or publisher. It has recently become a requirement of many funders, and it is now Utrecht University policy to publish literature as Open Access. Open Data is the publishing of the data that was a part of a research project so that others can  validate and re-use research data. 

Publishing research data in online repositories and making them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) ensures that Open Data contains the necessary aspects to be permanently identified as a unique data set, which can be searched and retrieved in different data platforms and contains various content-related leads that can be reused for other applications. 

The development towards open science requires researchers to document, explain, and structure their data in ways that was not necessary before. Furthermore, writing research code to make the analysis reproducible and subsequently publishing the code is slowly becoming the norm. While this allows for more collaboration, more rigorous peer-review, quick identification of bugs, as well as easy reuse that generates new insights, this also places a burden on researchers to write good documentation and to troubleshoot a new pool of users. The Research Engineering team can help you develop and share research software. 

As the Data Stewards for the faculty of Geoscience, we want to help create workflows and protocols to prepare your data and data analysis with reproducibility and publication in mind from the get-go. If personal data is involved, we can help ensure data remains accessible for open science, while still complying with the GDPR. Furthermore, we want to learn from your examples of the effects of sharing data openly on your field, and to share best practices.