From ‘the lab’ to the real world: why and how sharing research findings empowers the scientific community and benefits society as a whole

Researchers and innovators share the same goal: improving people's lives and livelihoods by finding solutions to today's biggest challenges. They can achieve this common goal more effectively by cooperating openly, sharing knowledge, results and tools as early and widely as possible, as well as promoting public engagement in research and innovation. In other words, practicing open science.

Open science is mandatory under Horizon Europe, the EU’s research and innovation programme, as the EU wants public funding to have a real impact on our lives, the economy and the environment, and research doesn't have impact if it stays behind closed doors. This is not in the public interest. This is not how science progresses.  

This seems to be obvious for EU citizens. In a Eurobarometer survey published this month, 80% agreed with the statement that scientific results of publicly funded research should be made available online free of charge, as is the case for EU-funded research. 

All research projects receiving Horizon Europe funding have the legal obligation to: openly share their results with people who can best make use of them; and use results in developing, creating and marketing or improving a product, process, or service, or shaping a policy that could have a positive impact on the public's quality of life. 

Over the last few weeks, we have been communicating about the many good reasons to make scientific results publicly available, and we have also provided some guidance for you to make the most of your research findings. Here is a summary:

The benefits of sharing your research findings:  

• You can maximise the impact of your research 
• You can enable others to learn from your work 
• You can empower the research community, authorities, the industry and civil society 
• You can provide evidence-based policy recommendations 
• You can translate research results into real-impact solutions. Discover some examples

Watch the video

Some guidance to maximise your impact:

• Six ways to help you share your findings with a broader audience, and empower not only fellow researchers, but also industry, policymakers and civil society.
• Four ways of sharing results can boost your career also, in non-academic sectors. 
• 10 steps for you to reach and inform policymakers. Most participants to our recent poll stated that policymakers are their main audience, after peer researchers.
• The differences between communication, dissemination and exploitation of research results.
• The European Commission's free tools to help you share and uptake your scientific findings. 

To receive this information directly into your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.