Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Communications: Open Scholarship & Open Access

Open Scholarship

Open Scholarship (often also called Open Science or Open Research) is the practice of conducting the activities associated with scholarship in as open a manner as possible. Open scholarship processes and outputs should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. Open in this case means ‘Gratis’ (available without any financial or legal impediment) AND ‘Libre’ (free from any unnecessary restrictions on reuse, reproduction or redistribution).

Open Scholarship encompasses all areas of scholarship, not just the more widely known areas such as Open Access or Open Data. This diagram, from Foster Open Science, illustrates the all-encompassing nature of Open Scholarship.

What are the benefits of Open Scholarship?

  • One of the major benefits of Open Scholarship is faster knowledge transfer which is critical in situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has unfortunately as SPARC Europe noted ‘shone a light on just how critical the implications of open can be to society”. (see: https://sparceurope.org/covid-19-and-open-science/)
  • Efficiency is another benefit. Open Scholarship reduces duplication of research efforts and also enables more research to be conducted using pre-existing data. 
  • Quality is improved as research outputs are openly available for review, replication and validation.
  • Public accessibility to research outputs leads to greater public engagement and awareness of research developments. The public can also participate in research through ‘citizen science’ projects and initiatives
  • By allowing the accessibility and reuse of research, innovation and collaboration can be enabled and accelerated

 

 

Source: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/node/1420

Open Access in the Scholarly Communications Context

If the aim of scholarly communications is to disseminate as widely as possible your research findings then the single most powerful step you can take is to increase its visibility and accessibility by removing the paywall. Enabler technologies such as the Internet and associated services such as Google Scholar, and abstracting and indexing services (e.g. Scopus, Web of Science) have made research publications very find able. However, without liberal accessibility policies your research cannot be read. If your research cannot be read it has not been properly disseminated and cannot be cited. In other words, the work is not as impactful as it might have been.

For more details on Open Access please see our dedicated libguide