In the context of higher education, "open" typically refers to the idea of openness in access to research and educational resources, tools, and practices. Collectively referred to as "Open Scholarship," the principles of openness have been extended to multiple domains in academic institutions and environments, including open access publishing, open research, open data, open educational resources, and open pedagogy.
Open scholarship includes a variety of practices that aim to increase transparency, collaboration, and accessibility in the research process, such as licensing your datasets for reuse or uploading copies of peer-reviewed articles you have written to an online repository. Such practices promote the democratization of knowledge production and access, intersecting with a range of social justice and equity issues.
Adopting open scholarship practices has a number of benefits for researchers, ranging from greater impact and use of your research to the ability to access and adapt research protocols that have been shared online.
Below are a variety of ways you can make your research practices more open:
Reach out to your Library Liaison or Research and Instruction Librarian to learn more or get support with any of the above activities.
Adapted from Best Practices in Open Research created by the University of British Columbia, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
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