A part of the mission for the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, SUHF (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund), is to facilitate the transition to open science in Swedish HEIs. They have recently published two new recommendations, developed by their expert groups: a roadmap and action plan to open science, and a recommendation for how to implement current legislation regarding the retention and disposal of research information. Representatives from SUHF presented these documents at the SND network meeting in late April.
The Swedish government has set a goal to make research data from public authorities openly accessible no later than in 2026. This asks for a quick transition among Swedish HEIs. The national working group for research data at SUHF was asked to develop a national roadmap for open science. The roadmap, which was published in March last year, details what the HEIs must do to realize the government’s goal and to speed up the transition to open research data and research results.
The SUHF roadmap contains eight recommendations for actions that the HEIs need to take to achieve an open and FAIR science system. The actions span across areas such as research support services, collaborations with other HEIs and funding bodies, international work, and the creation of research and education environments that encourage and value the work with open science.
Here you can read the recommendations (in Swedish).
New guidelines support the implementation of the roadmap
To support the HEIs in implementing the recommendations, SUHF has also presented new guidelines. They build on international development and identify several actions that are necessary if Swedish HEIs want to be a part of EOSC, the European Open Science Infrastructure. Every action has a timeline and is connected to one of the eight recommendations in the roadmap. They concern several areas of investment for the HEIs. Some examples are:
- to provide relevant training in data management on a researcher level by 2025
- to make data management plans common practice by the end of 2022
- to offer researchers in the HEIs a comprehensive, needs-based, data-centred set of e-infrastructure services and workflows, for example services for analysis, storage, publication, dissemination, and long-term preservation of data by 2023
- to collaborate on policies, training materials, common training opportunities, common technical solutions, etc.
- to, during 2024, revise the criteria for assessing academic merits, which conflict with the goals for open science, based on current national and international work
- to provide active support to a publication landscape where subscription and hybrid publishing agreements are phased out.
’The guidelines are a support for the boards of the HEIs. They show that we need to keep working with these issues and they can serve as reasons to make decisions about resources for various actions’, said Gustav Nilsonne, who participated in drafting the guidelines, during his presentation at the SND network meeting.
The guidelines were presented to SUHF’s General Assembly on 16 March (as an action plan) and will be revised with comments from the HEIs’ governing bodies.
Recommendation on the implementation of legislation governing retention and disposal of research information
Another resource that will clarify the HEIs’ mission in relation to research data management is a recently published recommendation on how to apply legislation that governs disposal and retention of research information. The recommendation has been drawn up by an expert group for archives and information management at SUHF and was presented by Hanna Höie and Margareta Ödmark during the SND network meeting.
The recommendation will help the supporting functions in the HEIs, such as the archive, research data support, and IT, to interpret and implement current legislation. It is an extension and deepening of the parts of the SUHF roadmap that concern preservation and archiving of research information. The recommendation has two parts: one details the HEIs’ responsibility as public authorities and the legislation, the other introduces the information types and how they should be managed, and explains whether they can be disposed of or not.
Hanna Höie och Margareta Ödmark said that it has been necessary to clarify these tasks. The general recommendations from the Swedish National Archives (also known as RA-FS) state that research data can be disposed of, but that the data need to be assessed before a decision of disposal can be made. In practice, the HEIs rarely make such assessments. Instead, the data are disposed of without making an appraisal of the information, which means that material that could have been valuable in the future is lost. SUHF’s recommendation emphasizes that the HEIs are responsible for archival holdings and urges them to create implementation decisions and relevant governing documents, such as strategies for preservation and research data policies, to support them in these matters.
The recommendations from SUHF are general, and Hanna Höie and Margareta Ödmark said that the information needs to be processed and interpreted in each HEI, so that it can lead to practical guidelines for researchers.
’Research data management concerns for the DAU [Editor’s Note: research data support functions], and has to involve the management, several support functions, and not least the researchers themselves. How to implement the recommendations is a question for the archives, but they need to reach the rest of the organizations to have an impact,’ said Hanna Höie during the network meeting.