Introduction
Librarians make great advocates for open education, and we are in a unique position to promote open science too! You don’t have to be a science subject librarian to champion open science, or hold a degree in science yourself. As the go-to for both faculty and students, all librarians can take part in educating their communities about open science opportunities. I’m a Scholarly Communications Librarian, and I find that promoting open science fits in perfectly with my responsibilities around publishing. I hope this handbook will be helpful for librarians just starting out on their advocacy journey, open science champions, and everyone in between!
According to the Center for Open Science, open science is defined as “a global movement that aims to make scientific research and its outcomes freely accessible to everyone. By fostering practices like data sharing and preregistration, open science not only accelerates scientific progress but also strengthens trust in research findings.” The word trust is very important here, not only because of a general rising of distrust in science but also because open education as a movement relies on community building.
Some of the major benefits of open scientific research is that it is openly discoverable, available, and citable. This is where preprints come in! ASAPbio defines a preprint as “ a scientific manuscript that is uploaded by the authors to a public server. The preprint contains data and methods, but has not yet been accepted by a journal. While some servers perform brief quality-control inspections (see details on the practices of individual servers), the author’s manuscript is typically posted online within a day or so without peer review and can be viewed (and possibly translated, reposted, or used in other ways, depending on the license) without charge by anyone in the world…Preprints allow scientists to directly control the dissemination of their work to the world-wide scientific community.”
Open science as a whole, and preprints specifically, rely on a culture of sharing and trust. In the following chapters, we will explore how librarians can support graduate students and faculty in contributing to open science by publishing preprints.
