Open science in Europe: sharing knowledge while protecting personal data

Open science is Europe’s way of turning knowledge created with public money into a common good: papers free to read, research data shared in an organised way, and methods and code transparent enough for others to check. Alongside this, the EU’s data protection rules require researchers to handle information about people carefully. The two principles seem to pull in opposite directions, but they are designed to work together: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.

For Vietnamese students and researchers, understanding this spirit helps make the most of a vast body of knowledge and prepares them for projects with European partners.

Why open science matters

For decades, research papers sat behind expensive subscription walls. Universities, even in Europe, paid large sums to read research their own governments had funded. People in lower-income countries, doctors in provincial hospitals, teachers and curious citizens were largely shut out.

Open science asks a simple question: if the public has paid for research, why should it pay again to read it? And when data and methods are public, others can recheck results, spot errors and build on them, helping science correct itself faster.

Open access: free to read

There are two main routes to free reading. The first is publishing in open access journals, where publication costs are covered by funders or institutions instead of readers. The second is authors depositing their peer-reviewed manuscript in an institutional or subject repository.

Many European research funders, at EU and national level, require the work they fund to be open access. A group of funders has even joined forces around a shared commitment on this. As a result, the share of European research that can be read for free is growing quickly.

Preprints: fast but read with care

In many fields, researchers post manuscripts on preprint servers before peer review. This spreads results quickly, as the pandemic showed. But unreviewed work may contain errors. Readers, especially journalists and social media users, need to distinguish preprints from peer-reviewed papers.

FAIR data: open and usable

Opening data is not enough. A file without descriptions, where no one knows what the columns mean, is almost useless. Europe promotes the FAIR principles:

• Findable: persistent identifiers and descriptions so search tools can discover it.
• Accessible: a clear way to obtain the data, even when permission is needed.
• Interoperable: standard formats and vocabularies so it can be combined with other data.
• Reusable: a clear licence and information about provenance.

Large projects usually submit a data management plan at the outset, describing what data will be created, where it will be stored, how it will be shared and how it will be protected. Europe is also building an open science cloud to connect data repositories across countries.

The other side: protecting personal data

Much research involves people: medical records, surveys, interviews, genetic data, location data. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation treats personal data as belonging to people, not to researchers. Several principles directly affect research:

• Clear purpose: collect only what the stated research purpose needs.
• Minimisation: do not collect more than necessary.
• Legal basis: participants’ consent or another basis permitted by law.
• Security: encryption, access control, anonymisation or pseudonymisation where possible.
• Sensitive data such as health, genetics or religion has stricter rules.
• Transfers outside the EU require appropriate safeguards.

The regulation also includes some flexibility for scientific research, provided suitable safeguards are in place. Most universities have a data protection officer to advise.

How openness and protection coexist

The answer lies in the phrase as open as possible, as closed as necessary. Climate, astronomy or chemistry data can be fully open. Data about people can be anonymised before sharing, or made available only in secure controlled environments where approved researchers can analyse it without taking raw data out. Descriptions of the data are still published so others know it exists.

What this means for Vietnamese readers

Vietnamese students can read a growing amount of European research for free, from medicine to agriculture and the environment. Vietnamese researchers joining European projects should be ready for data management plans, consent procedures for participants and data-sharing agreements between partners. It may seem bureaucratic at first, but these are good research ethics standards that universities in Vietnam are also moving towards.

Citizen science

Open science also invites the public in. Across Europe, volunteers count birds, record rainfall, photograph plants, transcribe old documents and classify galaxies in online projects run by universities and museums. Their contributions feed real research, and participants learn how science actually works. Several of these projects welcome volunteers from anywhere in the world, so curious Vietnamese readers can take part from home.

Open debates

Open access has its own problems. When costs shift to authors, researchers with little funding may struggle to publish. Some low-quality journals exploit the model, charging fees without serious peer review. Data rules are sometimes criticised as complex enough to slow medical research. Europe is still adjusting the balance.

Practical advice

1. Look for papers in open repositories and on authors’ pages before thinking about paying.
2. Be wary of journals that invite submissions by spam email, promise fast publication and charge high fees.
3. When doing your own research, write a data management plan from the start.
4. For data about people, consult an ethics committee and explain things clearly to participants.
5. Learn open-source tools and share your analysis code alongside your papers.

Reproducibility as a habit

One quiet benefit of open science is that it changes daily habits in the lab. When you know your data and code will be public, you document them more carefully, name files sensibly and write down every step. Many European supervisors now teach these habits from the first year of a PhD. They make research slower at first, but much easier to defend, reuse and build on years later.

What to remember

Open science in Europe is not a slogan but a cultural shift: treating knowledge as shared while treating personal data as each person’s right. Europe’s effort to balance these two values is worth reflecting on for anyone doing research, anywhere.

Frequently asked questions