What is Open Research?
Learn more about open research, its benefits, and what the funders are saying.
Practicing Open Research
Open research extends the principles of open access publishing to the whole research cycle, inclusive of research protocols, data, code, software, and much more. It is about being as open as possible, as often as possible, and only being as closed as is necessary. It encompasses all disciplines and types of research. Through planning many elements of the research lifecycle can be made open, transparent, and reproducible.
The University of Melbourne is committed to disseminating its research as widely as possible and expects researchers to make their publications open access, as outlined in the Principles for Open Access to Research Outputs at the University of Melbourne.
Open Research and the Research Lifecycle
Benefits of Open Research
By engaging with open research you are enabling greater transparency and reproducibility to be applied to your work and research outputs. This, in turn, may lead to
- Creating opportunities for collaboration, both in and outside of your discipline
- Increasing access to research by individuals and organisations outside of academia, thus impacting and progressing real-world problems, impact, and lives faster
- Higher citation rates, as well as more outputs that can be cited. With data, software, and code being made available and being assigned persistent identifiers, a research project can have a larger impact within and beyond academia
- Greater efficiencies in research more broadly as less repetition is needed
- Improving research integrity by limiting the possibility of closed research practices. This in turn increases trust in research
- Compliance with funder mandates and institutional requirements
Funders and Open Research
At the funder mandated level, open research has focused on openly accessible research outputs such as journal articles, book chapters, and monographs. This is commonly referred to as open access. Recently, funders have begun including open data and other potential outputs, such as code and software, in their policies. Find out more on our Funder Open Access Policies page.
Further Support
Broadly, this resource has been organised from steps to take from planning your research, through to the publication of results. It can be used in partnership with the Open Research Guide, which provides practical, how-to information on the topics covered here.
For enquiries relating to open research, please email your discipline's Liaison Librarians, or arrange a time to consult a librarian.
Alternatively, you can contact the library, for any questions, feedback and suggestions please complete our Library Enquiries form below: