Open at Penn State
Penn State’s open initiatives are crucial to the advancement of affordable, discoverable, and equitable access to information, scholarly research, educational resources, and research data within the University community. The University Libraries and its partners across Penn State collaborate to reduce barriers to the sharing, access, and use of knowledge and information to drive innovation, engage our students, enable affordable access to education, and generate equal opportunities for all.
Open Access
Open Access removes the price barriers of the traditional commercial publishing model that scholarly publishing has been shoehorned into. In its simplest form, Open Access is a publishing model that makes works freely available, eliminating the cost associated with obtaining and using scholarly works. Sometimes Open Access publishing models also work to reduce permission barriers, allowing users to copy, redistribute, and adapt the works. Open Access publishing doesn’t adhere to just one strict model, but describes a broad range of publisher policies and open permissions. Open Access allows you to share your work with a broad audience free of restrictions.
The University Libraries' Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright supports Open Access policies and publishing by supporting the work of University-wide open endeavors with policy and copyright advice, as well as providing instructional and informational services to the community regarding:
- Author rights
- Copyright
- Publishers’ archiving policies
- Publishing agreements and addenda
- Funder requirements
Visit Open Access Contact the Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright at openaccess@psu.edu.
Open Educational Resources
Open Education at Penn State seeks to broaden access to learning and training traditionally offered by a formal education system through resources, tools, and practices that can be fully used, shared, and adapted in a digital environment.
These resources and tools are often called Open Educational Resources (OER), which Penn State defines as any type of educational materials that are available to the University community with little or no cost. Typically, the nature of Penn State's open materials means that students, faculty, and staff can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them within the University community.
These practices often fall under the model for Open Pedagogy which includes, at a basic level, teaching with OER and embracing open educational practices in the classroom.
University Libraries partners with Teaching and Learning with Technology to develop and deliver OER affordable course content initiatives and offer faculty development support. In January 2017, University Libraries joined the Open Textbook Network, located at the University of Minnesota's Center for Open Education.
Open Education support is offered in the following areas:
- Assessment and discovery of OER
- Adopting, adapting, or creating OER
- Open and OER outreach
- Pressbooks
- Creative Commons Licensing
- Open Textbook Network
Visit Open Education Contact the Open Education Resources Team at oer@psu.libanswers.com.
Open Publishing
University Libraries' Open Publishing is the Open Access imprint for Penn State. The Libraries publish full-featured electronic scholarly journals, searchable annotated bibliographies, and other publications types, such as monographs, topical web portals, and conference proceedings. The journals are published using Open Journal Systems (OJS), and our other publications are supported using a variety of other platforms (e.g., Drupal, Biblio).
All of our publications are freely available to view online and download, and authors are never charged a processing fee. All copyrights are retained by the individual authors, journals, or sponsoring entity, and most publications are licensed for use under a Creative Commons license.
When someone chooses to publish their journal or other publication with Libraries' Open Publishing, the journal managers and/or Editors-in-Chief are provided with the appropriate level of support based on their needs. Some of the services include:
- OJS setup and support
- Assistance obtaining ISSNs and DOIs
- Guidance on abstracting/indexing/discovery services
- Analytics information
- Preservation of publication material
- Open Access repository services
- PR and Marketing assistance for Imprint publications
Visit Open Publishing Contact the Open Publishing Team at openpublishing@psu.edu.
PSU Press Unlocked
Unlocked is an open access initiative launched by PSU Press in 2016. The humanities and social sciences titles found here continue our 60-plus-year commitment to disseminating learned, relevant, first-class scholarly publications as widely as possible. Unlocked books are published in partnership with multiple platforms, including Ubiquity Press, Knowledge Unlatched, and JSTOR. Physical editions are available for purchase in print-on-demand format directly from PSU Press or through your favorite bookseller. PSU Press Unlocked offers access to:
- Newly Unlocked Titles
-
Featured Unlocked Titles
- All Unlocked Titles
Visit PSU Press Unlocked Contact the PSU Press at http://www.psupress.org/about/contact.html. 
Open Research
Open Research and Open Data refer to the concept that the products of research are more than published manuscripts and books, but the data, software and other things that were used to create those manuscripts and books are essential to validate the work, reproduce the work, and also can be reused in novel ways in new research and scholarship. Additionally, all the major STEM funders as well as the NEH Digital Humanities require that research products from funded research are openly available.
Open Research, however, requires more than just making the content available. It also often requires additional information to make the content understandable. This is especially important as research and scholarship uses increasingly large and complex data, complex software and workflows, and reuses data from a variety of sources.
University Libraries' Data Services Team offers services, consultation, and technical support in a variety of areas including:
- Data management
- Finding data
- Geospatial Mapping and Analysis
- Statistical Consultations
- Data archiving and preservation
- ScholarSphere
Visit Open Research Contact the Research Data Management Team at L-DATA-MGMT@lists.psu.edu.
Open Source
University Libraries has made several important contributions to open-source software. ScholarSphere, our digital repository for publications, data and presentations, is built on software developed here and widely used around the world. We also use a variety of open-source software for variety of our services, including our public website, which uses Drupal, a widely used open-source content management system.
University Libraries offers several services related to open-source software, including:
- How to find software
- How to make software available and open-source
- Licensing
- Documentation
- Release
- GitHub
- Development guidance
Visit Scholarsphere Contact the Open Research Team at L-DATA-MGMT@lists.psu.edu