Open Scholarship & Scholarly Publishing

For those who are thinking about how to gain access to the tools and content you need to produce your research with sound practices, and then share your methodology, protocols, source code, data, graphs, articles, books and more, this guide is for you.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) define open science/scholarship as:

“The principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reproducibility, and equity.” 

Open Scholarship is about transparently and publicly sharing research processes and outputs through openly accessible tools and platforms for the purpose of building vetted collective knowledge within and across disciplines and communities. It is an umbrella term for open access, open data, open educational resources, open research, open science, etc. It is based in the belief in the fundamental value of knowledge as a public, common good that is most positively impactful when its production and distribution are equitable, inclusive, open and transparent.

Scholarly Publishing is about means of vetting and sharing the works you produce. It covers a smaller slice of the research lifecycle.

The details of these systems are complex and situational. Please be in touch if you want to discuss how to optimize your work within them.

"Principles of Open Scholarship" (Slide 19) in "Peer Review in the Age of Open Science" by Tony Ross-Hellauer (2017) is licensed with a CC BY 4.0 license.

The UMass Amherst Libraries' Framework for Provider Agreements guides how the Libraries invest in content and infrastructure based on a set of principles that favor open scholarship, authors' rights and broad participation and use of scholarship. The Libraries collaborate with campus scholars to distribute their works.