Functions of Public Relations in Open Science

Abstract

In the recent years, the universities and research organizations in Japan have committed to actively manage research data, creating the open data environment accessible by public. Open data is expected to make research data more useful and stimulate innovation, and to achieve this goal it is important to identify and understand how the relation to the society in open science can be constructed and maintained, however such methodology to implement the effective relation has not been clarified. Considering the fact that implementation of the relation between an organization and the society is a fundamental function of public relations, in this paper we first extract and examine such functions of public relations already established in the academic pubic relation activities. Then, we investigate these functions inherent in open science. We also discuss some prospects of the open data approach to the public relations.