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Open scholarship

Open scholarship includes all forms of openness in the teaching and research environment. This guide outlines the practice at RMIT University.

Open research practice

Open research is scholarly research that is collaborative, transparent and reproducible and whose outputs are publicly available (European Commission, p. 4).

Open research applies to the entire research cycle, not just open access publishing. Open research extends to all disciplines and types of research, inclusive of protocols, data, code, software, publications, and more. Many elements of the research lifecycle can be made open, transparent, and reproducible.

Reference

European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. (2018). OSPP-REC : Open Science Policy Platform Recommendations, https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/5b05b687-907e-11e8-8bc1-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

Principles of open research

While the term 'open research' is often used interchangeably with 'open science', in the RMIT context we use 'open research' to refer to all disciplines and all methods of scholarly communication.

Three principles underpin open research practices: equityaccess and transparency. Increasingly, the policies and funding agreements of public research funders, universities and other research organisations reflect these principles.

Equity

Wherever possible, publicly funded research outputs should be available at no cost to the public who fund it, and to global communities regardless of economic status. This includes traditional research publications, data, software, and other outputs such as creative works.

Access

Research should have maximum possible visibility to ensure maximum public benefit. Scholarly communications architecture should ensure that research is discoverable and useable outside, as well as within, academic communities.

Transparency

Research processes, including peer review and study design, should be transparent and shared as openly as possible using online tools to ensure integrity and reproducibility.

Issues in open research

decorative imageOpen research is evolving quickly as new models arise to meet new needs and pressures. Take a look at the YouTube playlist linked below.

​​​​​Issues in open research YouTube playlist

"Close Up Photo of Female Hands on Laptop Keyboard and Mouse Pad" by wuestenigel is licensed under CC BY 2.0.