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Open@Brown

open access logo

Brown University is an open access institution.

What Is Open?

The goal of the open movement is to work toward solving many of the world’s most pressing problems in a spirit of transparency, collaboration, re-use, and free access.

Open Access

Open access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Through open access, research can be communicated in a way that utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do: accelerate research.

Open Data

Open data is FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Open data is data that can be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone – subject to, at most, the requirement to attribute and ShareAlike.

Brown University Library Open Data Guide

Open Education

Open education encompasses resources, tools, and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve worldwide educational access and effectiveness. Open education was created to ensure that education is available, accessible, modifiable, and free anywhere in the world.

Brown Library Open Education Guide

Events at the Library

Why Open@Brown?

The open movement implicitly supports several facets of Brown’s Strategic Plan, Building on Distinction. The values and goals set forth in Brown’s commitments toward integrative scholarship and academic excellence rely upon the open communication and sharing of knowledge that occurs organically through an open paradigm of research and teaching.

The open movement:

  • promotes the acceleration of research
  • increases the potential for collaboration
  • contributes to the democratization of information
  • supports community partnerships

Questions?

Contact Open@Brown.edu to ask about:

  • ways to make your work more accessible
  • choosing a copyleft and open source license
  • creating and/or using open education resources
  • capturing and maintaining your research data so that it is useful to others, and archiving it in an accessible repository
  • using the open repositories like the Open Science Framework
  • preserving and sharing open access publications at Brown
  • any other related questions, suggestions, or comments