Technological advances give teachers new opportunities to share their teaching materials to a wider user community and even run online teaching sessions. However, opening up learning and teaching is also challenging and raises many technical, legal and cultural questions.

Open Education is education that often takes place using digital technology. The aim is to expand access to and participation in learning by lowering barriers and increasing its accessibility, supply and learner-centeredness.

Openness has always been part of responsible research. However, in a short time, what is meant by openness has changed. New digital tools and society's expectations create opportunities, but they also push the research community to increase the transparency of research and change the ways in which research is carried out, how results are disseminated and how researchers are rewarded. 

Openness of research data increases the reliability and reproducibility of scientific research. It is often possible to use the same data in multiple ways in different studies. However, open access to the data does not require that the data be fully open. For example, it is possible to store the data in secure data archives (repository) so that their reuse requires a research permit. However, just the terminology can be challenging – should we talk about research materials or data? And what should be included in data?

Open access to scholarly publications by definition means that research publications can be read online free of charge and without hindrance. This is one of the pillars of open science. Through open access, research results are available to as many people as possible as quickly as possible.

The benefits of open access are obvious, but achieving them requires cultural change and redistribution of the publishing costs.

The aim of the National Open Science and Research Steering Group is to bring together the research community to promote open science. All the key organisations in the Finnish research community have nominated their representatives to the Steering Group. The current Steering Group will work till the end of 2026.

The promotion of open science and research is a collaborative effort within the Finnish research community. The work is organized around four expert panels and their respective working groups. These expert panels convene annually at open science and research events, where they identify coordination and collaboration needs for open science and research.