Open Access

What is Open Science?

Open Science is "the movement to make scientific products and processes accessible to and reusable by all" (Open Science Training Handbook, 2024). Practicing Open Science allows researchers to openly collaborate and share research, methods, data, software, and more, with the goal of making all parts of their scientific research open. Open Science is closely related to the concepts of Open Access, Open Code, Open Data, Open Source, and other open access initiatives.

On This Page:

• Introduction to Open Science Video
• Tools
• 5 Steps for Getting Started in Open Science
• Open Infrastructure

Watch the Open Science Workshop and Symposium videos!

These events were hosted in 2025 by the College of Arts and Sciences and Dr. Qiusheng Wu with collaborations from the UTK Libraries. Learn about open access funding, open code, and other elements of open science.

Attribution: FOSTER

Tools and Resources

• Defining Open Science
  • Book chapter with helpful graphics.
• Open Access- Beyond Publishing
  • Guide from ASU.
• Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st-Century Research
  • Open book that came from a study on advancing open science.
• Open Science Resources
  • List of open science resources and links from user Asoplata on GitHub.
• Open Science Training Handbook
  • "This book offers guidance and resources for Open Science instructors and trainers, as well as anyone interested in improving levels of transparency and participation in research practices."
• Open.Science.Gov
  • "To strengthen the foundation for a future of open science, Federal agencies celebrated a Year of Open Science in 2023, engaging in events and activities intended to spark culture change, strengthen infrastructures and policies, build capacity, recognize and celebrate open science contributions, and inspire engagement."

Open Repositories and Platforms

Below is a list of open repositories and platforms where you may share your Open Science research, methods, and data.

• arXiv
  • "arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics."
• DataCite
  • "We are a global community that shares a common interest: to ensure that research outputs and resources are openly available and connected so that their reuse can advance knowledge across and between disciplines, now and in the future."
• Dataverse
  • "The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data."
• Dryad
  • A data repository- UTK researchers may apply for funding support with our Data Archiving and Sharing Fund
• Figshare
  • "A home for papers, FAIR data and non-traditional research outputs that is easy to use and ready now."
• MetaROR
  • "A new platform designed to transform how we review and share metaresearch."
• Open Grants [in progress]
  • "An open repository of funding proposals will elevate their recognition as scholarly products, improve access for the public and other grant seekers, and bring transparency to this facet of the research process. This site documents efforts toward this goal, including documentation of current planning activities and a prototype database."
• openRxiv

  • "openRxiv is an independent non-profit, the new organizational home for bioRxiv and medRxiv,
    enabling researchers to instantly share groundbreaking findings with the global scientific community."

• Open Science Framework
  • "OSF is a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration."
• Sustainability Academic Network (SUSAN)

  • "Explore thousands of datasets, academic papers, conferences, jobs, grants, local events, and institutes—all dedicated to Sustainability."

• TRACE Institutional Repository
  • UTK's repository, where researchers may freely upload and store their work in order to share it with Tennessee and the world
• Zenodo
  • "Built and developed by researchers, to ensure that everyone can join in Open Science."

Open Coding and Open Source 

Below are several resources that allow you to work on open coding and open source projects. Some of these resources have paid versions, but they all have a free version available as well.

• CodePen
  • "CodePen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers. Build and deploy a website, show off your work, build test cases to learn and debug, and find inspiration."
• Github
  • "Build and ship software on a single, collaborative platform."
• Jupyter Notebook
  • "Free software, open standards, and web services for interactive computing across all programming languages."
• OpenStack
  • "OpenStack is a set of software components that provide common services for cloud infrastructure."
• SourceForge
  • "Compare business software to find the best tools. Create, collaborate & distribute to nearly 20 million users worldwide."
• TagTeam
  • "The open-source tagging platform and feed aggregator."