The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, adopted in November 2021, emphasizes the values of quality and integrity of research, diversity and inclusiveness, equity and fairness, and collective benefit that underpin Open Science. To be truly open and valuable, science must be documented and supported by properly managed and, whenever possible, openly shared data.

Funding agencies have introduced strict requirements for the open sharing of research results, including manuscripts of scientific articles, data, and other research products. These must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) for humans and machines. To support its researchers, IIT has significantly enhanced its Open Science and Research Data Management support services in collaboration with the Research Organization, Information and Communication Technology, and Legal Affairs Directorates.

The most important phase of the research data lifecycle is planning. IIT provides professional support to its scientists in creating data management plans (DMPs), including guidelines and tailored, discipline-specific templates. A support working group for DMP writing has been created, involving IT, legal, technology transfer professionals, and data curators.

IIT has adopted an internal Information Security policy that guides researchers in data protection depending on the risk classification. Personal data handling must be carried out in line with relevant laws and regulations. IIT provides IT and legal support to researchers for the correct management of personal and high-risk data. RDM support has also developed workflows and procedures for the collection of metadata and documentation that enables data reuse, as well as tailored storage and backup solutions for different volumes and types of data.

IIT has joined national transformative agreements that support the transition towards an open-access scholarly publishing model. IIT has also set up its own institutional research data repository, IIT Dataverse, which allows data to be shared according to the FAIR principles, cited, and linked to scientific articles by assigning digital persistent identifiers. IIT Dataverse is one of the first Italian instances of Dataverse, a web application developed by Harvard University and adopted by many universities and research performing organizations around the globe. IIT Dataverse is catalogued in re3data.org, integrated with OpenAIRE Explore, and compliant with the definition of "trusted repository" as defined by the European Commission in Horizon Europe Open Science guidelines. RDM support has produced several guidelines and procedures to help researchers in correct data sharing either in IIT Dataverse or in other repositories.

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