Open Access

OpenCon is a unique conference series and community that aims to empower the next generation to advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data. Once a year, OpenCon brings together leading students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world’s information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data.

Open Access Journals provide the free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. The resources below are portals to open access, scholarly journals.

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources released under an open license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. OERs can be textbooks, full courses, lesson plans, videos, tests, software, or any other tool, material, or technique that supports access to knowledge.

Open Data (non-textual materials, including datasets, statistics, transcripts, survey results, and the metadata associated with these objects) is research data that:

1. Is freely available on the internet;
2. Permits any user to download, copy, analyze, re-process, pass to software or use for any other purpose; and
3. Is without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

Open Access Directory of Data Repositories is one source to locate Open Data.  Options for storing research data can be found on the Research Data Management guide. Open Data storage options include Scholarship & Creative Works @ Digital UNC.