Article VI of the Recommendation recommends that
“Adherents, in co-operation with research institutions, funders, and scientific communities, foster and support the development and implementation of effective models of reward and recognition that provide incentives and remove disincentives for researchers and research support staff to provide access to research data and other research-relevant digital objects from public funding.”
To enhance incentives and rewards for open science, policymakers should integrate machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs) to automate data-sharing processes and link them to funding mechanisms.
Research impact assessments should explicitly recognise data and software publications, supported by robust citation tracking, bibliometric measures, and discipline-specific impact standards.
The adoption of persistent identifiers (PIDs) like DOIs and ORCID IDs should be mandated across research workflows, ensuring interoperability in FAIR-aligned repositories. Flexible embargo policies should balance open access with researchers’ needs for data exploitation and intellectual property protection, with standardised approval processes and discipline-specific guidelines.
Academic promotion and funding evaluations should prioritise open science contributions, while national and international initiatives, such as European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), should facilitate metadata federation and harmonisation of open science recognition.
The implementation of incentives and rewards for open science faces several hurdles, including the lack of cohesive institutional strategies for research data management (RDM) and the continued prioritisation of traditional research outputs in academic promotion and grant evaluations.
The absence of standardised policies for data citation, embargo periods, and persistent identifiers (PIDs) creates inconsistencies across disciplines and countries, hindering international collaboration and the recognition of open science contributions.
Researchers often face conflicting embargo policies, with some disciplines requiring extended restrictions for ethical or commercial reasons, while others benefit from immediate data sharing. Without enforcement mechanisms, embargo extensions can be misused to delay competition.
Additionally, national privacy laws, institutional autonomy, and technical limitations complicate the widespread adoption of PIDs, while the lack of reliable impact metrics for data publications further discourages their integration into research assessment systems.
Addressing these challenges requires policy alignment, global coordination, and a cultural shift to embed open science incentives into research evaluation frameworks.
Foster, and where appropriate, require measures to recognise and reward access to and maintenance of research data and digital objects from public funding as recognised research outputs.
Develop criteria for researcher recruitment, advancement, and grant review that assess the accessibility, quality, and impact of research data and digital objects, considering dataset sensitivity.
Support robust, open indicators on the impact of access to publicly funded research data and digital objects, including tracking data and software citations. Develop and adopt approaches like contributor taxonomies to credit all research contributions, from conceptualisation to final write-up.
Foster environments favourable to disseminating research outputs beyond publications and recognising them in research assessment.
Promote data and software citation in academic practice, including developing citation standards and acknowledging data and code creators as key contributors, aiming to make such practices standard publishing requirements by funding agencies.
Notwithstanding the general aim of providing timely open access to research data and other research-relevant digital objects from public funding, recognize that researchers and institutions may require a reasonable limited period of exclusive use of the research data and other research-relevant digital objects they produce, for example to provide time for data analysis and preparation of final results and/or intellectual property claims. Any processes involving restrictions, such as embargo periods, should be subject to clear rules and limitations developed by funding agencies in co-operation with the relevant stakeholder communities.
Promote, and require as appropriate, the use of unique digital identifiers for individual researchers and research-relevant digital objects to enhance citation practices and ensure due credit is given to all contributors.
