Open science is an approach based on open cooperative work and systematic sharing of knowledge and tools as early and widely as possible in the scientific process. Adequate management of IPR over research results is necessary for such cooperative work and systematic sharing to happen.
However, a lack of awareness and understanding of IPR -in particular given the complexity of the relevant legal and regulatory landscape- sometimes leads to mismanagement of IP and the consequent difficulty of researchers and institutions to determine how their research is disseminated.

Copyright is an area of particular importance for open science within the field of IP, since the bundle of rights that authors have on their original works (e.g., scientific publications or databases) allow them to set the conditions for their dissemination and re-use.

Greater awareness of their rights and how they can be exercised would help authors to make more informed choices and get them in control about the further usage of their research results. They will also align themselves better with open science practices and comply with funder open access mandates.

IP management is therefore an important enabler of open science. Against this context, there is the need to improve knowledge among researchers and their institutions of concepts such as copyright, licences and patents, leading to an understanding of the options at their disposal for, amongst other, archiving, posting, distributing and eventually publishing their scholarship in ways that enable open science in their own terms. There is also a need to improve the understanding of the relationship between open science and IP, in particular how the adequate management of IP lies at the very core of open science.

Projects are expected to take into account the existing IP service delivery landscape and the existing training and capacity building efforts and materials offered by European Commission service contracts.

Legal and financial set-up of the Grant Agreements – Beneficiaries will be subject to the following additional obligations regarding open science practices:

Beneficiaries must ensure early and open sharing of the outputs deriving from their activities under a Creative Commons Attribution –CC BY- or equivalent license, including training and educational materials. Applicants must acknowledge and incorporate these obligations in the proposal, outlining the efforts they will make towards meeting them and in Annex I to the Grant Agreement.