Open Scholarship, also known as Open Science, is a philosophy that holds that all forms of scholarship ought to be freely accessible to everybody everywhere without encumbrance of any kind. The belief is that the rapid, seamless, and widespread sharing of scholarly output will foster greater creativity while providing more transparency and instilling more trust in research.
All types. These could include, but are not limited to, any of the following:
Scholarship of all types is advanced by sharing information and ideas as widely as possible. The old model of publishing scholarly books and journals is no longer able to keep up. The costs of scholarly resources have increased far more rapidly than the general inflation rate for a generation. This has resulted in a crisis in higher education where students can no longer afford their textbooks and researchers—even those at elite universities—are hobbled by not having direct immediate access to relevant papers. This is reflected in citation counts. Multiple studies have shown that scholarly papers that are made freely available are more highly cited than those locked behind paywalls (Ale Ebrahim et al., 2013; Antelman, 2004; Hitchcock, 2004; Law, 2007; McCabe & Snyder, 2014).
Open scholarship is implemented through a number of independent but related initiatives, each developed to meet a particular need. Open publishing or open resource sharing initiatives include open educational resources (OERs), open access (OA), open data, and open-source software (OSS). These initiatives are all supported by several open licensing systems.
repository.iit is a great way to make your work open. The library will work with faculty, students, or staff members to deposit research in the institutional repository. We can make the work open to the general public, pending your agreement with your publisher. Even when work is not able to be placed in the institutional repository because of copyright restrictions, there may be other versions of the work (such as preprints) that can be made freely accessible.
The library has an open access policy for the published works of librarians. This policy was created using the Harvard Open Access Project as a guide. Please contact library@iit.edu if your department or college is interested in developing an open access policy.
If you are considering publishing in an open access journal, we welcome you to contact the library at library@iit.edu. We can help provide information about the credibility of the journal, and can also assist in helping faculty to navigate copyright agreements with traditional publishers so that work can be made open access.
Ale Ebrahim, N., Salehi, H., Embi, M. A., Habibi, F., Gholizadeh, H., Motahar, S. M., & Ordi, A. (2013). Effective strategies for increasing citation frequency. International Education Studies, 6(11), 93–99.
Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries, 65(5), 372–382.
Hitchcock, S. (2004). The effect of open access and downloads ('hits’) on citation impact: A bibliography of studies.
Law, D. (2007). Making science count: Open Access and its impact on the visibility of science. Institutional Archives for Research: Experiences and Projects in Open Access, 14–22.
McCabe, M. J., & Snyder, C. M. (2014). Identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals. Economic Inquiry, 52(4), 1284–1300.
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