Best Practices in Open Research

Open sharing of research results, methods and data is central to scientific practice, and stimulates new forms of communication and collaboration. Today many funding agencies are mandating open access to the products of scholarship, accelerating research and learning and increasing the impact universities can have beyond their walls.

Benefits to researchers

Open research practices increase exposure to your publications, which can help secure your next grant and build your scholarly network.

Open sharing of scientific outputs, data, and methodology promotes wider evaluation and scrutiny by the scientific community, encouraging greater reproducibility and integrity of research results. In this sense, openness contributes to maintaining science’s self-correcting principle.

Open access to research outputs improves the efficiency of the scientific system by reducing duplication and costs of creating and reusing data; allowing more research from the same data; and multiplying opportunities for public participation in the research process.

Global impact results by addressing challenges that require coordinated international actions, such as climate change or disease outbreaks.  Solutions are identified more rapidly and access to knowledge is democratized.

Innovation and knowledge transfer: Open science reduces delays in the re-use of the results of scientific discovery, promoting a swifter path from research to producing new products and services. It enables connectivity between researchers and policy-makers to improve outcomes in public organizations.

Demonstrating impacts beyond the academy can build institutional funding and recruitment power.

How can I make my research practice more open?

Researchers should regularly evaluate their practices with a view to making them more open and transparent. Consider to what degree you:

UBC Library can help

Connect with UBC librarians specializing in research data management, open access, and new forms of scholarly dissemination. Contact us for a consultation or see our menu of workshops and events.

Librarians also offer workshops in conducting systematic reviews which are used in knowledge translation and known to enhance the reproducibility of research.

Some text on this page was adapted from What are the Benefits of Open Science?, created by Gema Bueno de la Fuente and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.