The Open Science paradigm is recognised as a fundamental and indispensable principle for knowledge growth and as a requirement for sustainable natural resource management policies based on shared and transparent scientific knowledge.

Scientific communities, public actors and the productive world need free, easy and rapid access to certified data and information. It is also important that management choices are understood, shared and supported by all citizens and stakeholders, and possibly the result of participatory processes. The 'Decide, Announce and Defend' strategy, according to which the politician decides, communicates to the public and defends their decision, is gradually being replaced by the 'Share, Open, Negotiate' strategy, based on citizen involvement in data collection, education and scientific information.
The development of infrastructures for the collection, standardisation, validation and free dissemination of data is a fundamental step to promote the sharing, reuse and redistribution of knowledge (social dimension), but also to ensure respect for the principles of rigour and responsibility (cultural dimension), as well as the transparency of production, validation and dissemination processes (economic dimension).

Finally, the free dissemination of knowledge, without restrictions of any kind (census, nationality, gender, political beliefs, or other) represents a clear contribution in terms of social inclusion and equity, as well as environmental education.

OGS has also envisaged the definition and systematic use of open data policies for data collected under institutional programmes, supported by the possibility of releasing DOIs, the production and sharing of programmes (open software), the launch of dissemination activities and the dissemination of scientific knowledge, high-level training and Citizen Science activities. Moreover, it has a consolidated tradition in the open distribution of data in various sectors and has already developed a series of data management systems and portals that are intensively used by the relevant scientific communities and is moving forward with a major programme of scientific and environmental diplomacy activities.

With a view to a Virtual Research Environment (VRE), where scientific communities can meet and work collaboratively, even across different disciplines, it was necessary to develop a series of methods and technologies that were then used within the various management portals of the Institution, integrating them with the major data sharing initiatives at European and international level such as EMODnet and SeaDataNet.

OGS is strongly committed to promoting and strengthening the use of Creative Commons CC-BY licenses and Persistent Identifiers (DOIs) both for data and for scientific outputs in general.

An important programme of scientific and environmental diplomacy activities is carried out by OGS in the awareness that the Open Science paradigm can be fully implemented through strong scientific collaborations between nations to address common problems and build partnerships at the international level, with particular attention to less developed or developing countries, to contribute also to the improvement of diplomatic relations between countries. 

The "Open Science" mission is developed following 5 scientific priorities covering the different areas of expertise of the organisation:

• Findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) data;
• Risk education and ocean literacy;
• High-performance computing, artificial intelligence and digital twins;
• Citizen Science;
• Science and environmental diplomacy.