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Open Science
We're here to help you make your research more reproducible, collaborative, transparent, equitable and impactful!
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“Open Science is the practice of science in such a way that others can collaborate and contribute, where research data, lab notes and other research processes are freely available, under terms that enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods.”
—FOSTER Open Science Training Handbook
What is Open Science?
Open science encompasses a set of practices and principles aimed at promoting equitable access to research, increased collaboration, diversification of the research landscape and scientific reproducibility and research quality and rigor. While open science practices align with mandatory federal compliance requirements around data and publication sharing, as established by the 2022 OSTP Public Access (Nelson) Memo, the ideals of open science and scholarship also provide many benefits to the researcher, such as increased engagement and visibility with the public, higher citation rates and more immediate influence on public policy and external research communities.
Open science includes all aspects of the research lifecycle, including (but not limited to):
Open methodology
Open source/code
Open protocol
Open data
Open access/publication
Open peer review
Open educational resources
Citizen science
UCLA Library Services
Open Access Publishing: UC authors have many options for making their scholarly articles openly available, either by publishing open access with a publisher or depositing their paper in a scholarly repository, such as eScholarship. Whichever route an author chooses, UCLA Librarians can help. We can assist in identifying journals with which the UC has publishing agreements that waive the partial or full cost of open access fees. We can also help authors locate repositories to deposit their final publication, as well as navigate any associated embargo or copyright questions.
Open Science Workshops: The UCLA Library hosts workshops every quarter that assist researchers with common open science challenges, such as selecting appropriate data repositories, understanding preprints, the basics of DATA management for STEM and how to publish open access. If you have ideas for workshops you’d like to see us offer, please don’t hesitate to reach out with suggestions.
Navigating Funder Mandates: Researchers who receive federal grants or other research money must comply with the open or public access requirements of that federal agency or body. UCLA Librarians can assist you with navigating NIH and NSF funder mandates, reviewing data management and sharing plans and using the DMP tool, as well as selecting appropriate data or scholarly repositories.
Tools and Resource Support: Through UCLA subscriptions, researchers have access to many tools to support their open science practice, including Protocols.io, UCLA Dataverse, UC Dryad, Vivli, Overleaf, e-Scholarship and software packages that include ArcGIS, MATLAB, Python and more. In addition to supporting access to these tools, UCLA Librarians can also help researchers navigate freely available open science tools and resources, such as the DMP tool, Zotero, Open Science Framework, electronic lab notebooks, Zenodo, ORCiD and arXiv, to name just a few.
Have Further Questions?
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