Towards the implementation of an Openness Profile: the case of Research.fi

13 November 2025, 11:15-11:30

Laura Himanen, CSC - IT Center for Science

The goal of the CSC pilot was to enable researchers to showcase their activities and merits in advancing open science. To reach this goal the concept of Openness Profile was tested and implemented in the context of the researcher profile. Researcher profile is a service offered by Research.fi for creating an affiliation independent profile consisting of information coming from ORCID profiles and home organisations. Research.fi is a national research information hub funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture that collects and disseminated information on research conducted in Finland.

The original plan was to enrich the researcher profile with data on open science activities, merits and outputs, but as the Openness Profile developed within the project was not mature enough for us to test it as a service, we decided to create an openness profile based on its concept utilizing only such information that is available in the Research.fi data base. This limited the implementation into enabling the highlighting of open access publications as well as activities and prizes that advance open science. In addition the implementation enables adding a narrative on what role open science plays in a researcher’s work to the profile. The aim of the testing was to find out if showcasing open science activities was considered a useful feature as well as if the execution of the concept in the context of the profile was considered successful.

Even as a limited implementation, the Openness Profile was considered as a useful and user-friendly addition to the researcher profile by our test groups consisting of researchers and research funders. However, the main message for future development of the Openness Profile from the researchers was that the current information content of the profile is insufficient to show the whole picture. Being able to show merits that highlight capabilities and competence in open science was considered as more important than being able to show outputs. These merits include, for example, pre-registering, pre-prints, and compliance to FAIR principles. For research funders, as potential utilisers of information in an Openness Profile, the challenge is in defining what type of openness should be rewarded when assessing funding applications. You get what you measure, so if funders select, for example, the wrong kind of open access, there is a chance of causing unintended and even negative consequences.

The first stage of the implementation, enabling the highlighting of open access publications, is now in production in Research.fi. The second and third stage, enabling the highlighting of activities and prizes that advance open science and the inclusion of narratives to the profile, will take place during the year 2026. But in order to cater to the wishes of researchers, for enabling them to highlight also the process, not only the outputs, further work is still needed to enable retrieving new types of information from external sources.

Laura Himanen, CSC – IT Center for Science. 
ORCID: 0000-0001-8289-9766

Dr Laura Himanen works as a project manager at CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland. Her main tasks concentrate on the development of the national research information hub, Research.fi. In GraspOS she leads the pilot activities in work package 5. Himanen is an expert in responsible research assessment and an active participant in several working groups and networks within the areas of research assessment and open science both internationally and nationally, for example, in the INORMS Research Evaluation Group, in the CoARA Working Group on Open Infrastructure for Responsible Research Assessment, and in the Finnish Steering Group for Responsible Assessment of the Researcher.