Open Scholarship
Open scholarship, which encompasses open access, open data, open educational resources, and all other forms of openness in the scholarly and research environment, is changing how knowledge is created and shared. For research libraries, open scholarship offers opportunities for campus collaborations and new service roles.
An organization, Enabling Open Scholarship, designed for senior management in universities and research institutions worldwide, was launched in September 2009 to further the opening up of scholarship and research by providing information on current developments, advice and guidance on policy and process implementation, and forums for discussion and debate among members.
A formal definition of open access can be found in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a public statement of principles first articulated in 2001: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. ARL is a signatory to BOAI and on November 1, 2011, also endorsed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, a complementary statement.
A third statement on open access is the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, which is a set of principles drafted at a 2003 meeting hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin statements form the foundational base of statements on open access. Both free access and reuse rights are important components of open access.
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Data include the underlying “raw” information produced in the course of conducting research—so that others can review, repurpose, and/or aggregate that information to improve the quality, utility, and reach of the underlying research, or to build it into something new. The Open Knowledge Definition sets out the meaning of open data as “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”
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Open Educational Resources (OER) "are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." (Definition from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)
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