The term Open Science covers strategies and processes that aim to make consistent use of the opportunities offered by digitization in order to make all parts of the scientific process openly accessible, comprehensible and reusable via the Internet. This should open up new opportunities for science, society and the economy in dealing with scientific findings.
The aim is to continuously improve the quality of research and use research funding even more efficiently. Open Science thus makes a significant contribution to ensuring good scientific practice and also promotes the transfer of knowledge to society, business and politics.
Open Science is based on four basic principles:
- Transparency
- Reproducibility
- Reusability
- Open communication
At the Leibniz-IWT, the approaches listed below are implemented in accordance with the Open Science guidelines of the Leibniz Association.
Open Access
The Leibniz-IWT understands 'Open Access' to mean free access to scientific publications in the sense of a transparent scientific culture.
With the Open Access Policy (2023), the Leibniz-IWT has established a fixed framework for the handling of Open Access content.

Open and FAIR Data
Research data is a cornerstone of scientific knowledge and can often form the basis for further research (e.g. for data science), regardless of its original purpose. The sustainable protection and accessibility of quality-assured research data is therefore of enormous importance for science in the digital age.
The data provided by the Leibniz-IWT complies with the FAIR standard (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and is stored with sufficient metadata for unambiguous traceability, including the necessary software.
The data from experiments and simulations are stored, documented and provided with metadata in the institute-wide electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) "eLabFTW".
Further specific information on the Institute's Open Data Policy, in particular on the uniform document structure for publications specified by the Institute, is publicly available in the 'DataManagementGuidelines' document on GitHub.


Open Research Software
The Leibniz-IWT understands 'Open Research Software' to mean research output in the form of scientific software that is publicly accessible and can be referenced as 'open source'.
The Institute strives to increase the visibility and usability of scientific software as a research output and currently uses the 'Github' platform as a repository. This is also dealt with in the 'DataManagementGuidelines' document.

Open Infrastucture
The Leibniz-IWT practices the open infrastructure approach as part of its collaboration on the MAPEX Core Facility for Materials Analytics project by participating in the shared machine and equipment pool and thus enabling access to it for external parties.

Open Research Methodology
By using an ELN, it becomes possible to make the procedures and methods used to achieve scientific findings openly accessible. The same applies to the software stored on Github as open source

Open Event
'Open Events' are public events in which interested private individuals have the opportunity to enter into an exchange with experts from various disciplines. In recent years, the Leibniz-IWT has repeatedly provided the public with insights into current research projects with events such as 'Book a Scientist' or 'Science goes public' and promoted open dialog between science and society in the spirit of 'Open Events'.
