The research process can be broken into three basic stages or phases, and open tools and resources are available at each of these points in the process. Discovery and gathering of information are faster and cheaper thanks to open access materials and search tools. Processing and organizing research makes your scholarship transparent and collaborative when you use open infrastructure and tools. Finally, publishing and sharing the results of your research is faster and of higher impact when you choose open journals, platforms, and tools that make your research freely available to the world.
The resources in this section support discovery and gathering of information in a variety of ways, from tools to find legal alternatives to paywalled journal articles to collections of cutting edge pre-prints.
Open education includes tools, practices, and resources that leverage knowledge sharing, technology, open licenses, and collaboration in service of learning. Open educational resources (OER) are freely and publicly available teaching, learning, and research resources (e.g. simulations, textbooks, or videos) that are free of copyright or openly licensed.
This booklet is a product of the Scholarly Communications Team of the University of Virginia Library. This work is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).
We gratefully acknowledge the content and layout are based on original work by the Open Knowledge Committee in the University Libraries at Virginia Tech (hdl.handle.net/10919/87052.3)