The Nordic countries are particularly well suited for collaboration among each other due to social and cultural similarities. Also, as the countries are individually small, unifying efforts in science and technology to realise common undertakings will generally result in a better end-product and greater impact in the international arena. Finally, a Nordic-wide collaboration reduces the risks of duplication of effort and therefore promotes a more cost-efficient R&D segment within the Nordics.

In 2017 the NeIC Board identified “data management” as a subject that was not being sufficiently addressed in the NeIC project portfolio. The Board recommended that NeIC should direct some effort towards data management and, given the importance of research data in general and the onset of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) in the European arena, this seems timely and appropriate.

This document seeks to identify activities that can help to improve the conditions and means for enabling data-driven science in the Nordics. In particular, the relevance to EOSC and the greater visions of Open Science have emerged as an appropriate setting for this report. However, given the context, we limit our discussions and understanding of Open Science to Open Access (of publications) and Open Data (see the following section for a clarification on the terms and their definitions).