An international celebration of open access (OA) is taking place this week. This is the fifth and final post in a series of daily posts about open access.
Open science, or open scholarship, is the effort to make the entire research process transparent and accessible to everyone. Open science reflects a strong desire to release knowledge to the commons to allow everyone to access and build upon the work. Much of the impetus for this work comes out of a desire to improve the reproducibility of research, but also to have publicly-funded research actually available to the public.
Open science includes practices like:
- Open access – publishing the results of research openly for anyone to read
- Open peer review is used by some journals and this allows readers to see peer reviewers comments about the article
- Pre-registration is a practice of publicly sharing your hypothesis before you start your research. It help researchers establish primacy for their ideas, and aims to reduce or eliminate the practices of cherry picking data to make the results seem more significant or revising a hypothesis after research has been completed.
- Open source – using and creating software that is licensed to allow for reuse
- Open data – openly sharing the data associated with research results
- Using collaborative tools like open scientific notebooks, code repositories like GitHub, and collaborative authoring tools like Google Drive
UT has several resources that make adopting open science practices easier.
- UT Open Source Program Office – a brand new office on campus designed to support open source practices
- Texas Data Repository – repository for publishing research data
- Texas ScholarWorks – repository for publishing articles, conference papers/posters, and related materials
- Data & Donuts workshop series – last workshop of the semester on Open Source Geographic Information Systems is today from 12:00-1:15
- Digital Humanities workshop series – last workshop of the semester on Omeka, an open source archive & exhibition platform, is next Friday, Nov. 3rd from 12:00-1:00
- The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has a variety of systems and services to support open science practices
- Informational guides on various open science related topics, like Federal Government Public Access Policies and NIH Data Sharing Policy Information
Everyone has the ability to make their research more open by adopting some or all of the above open science practices. Consider which options make the most sense for you and your research. Please contact the Libraries if you have questions.
