Monday, October 21, 2024
Every October Open Access Week (OAW) is celebrated by universities and organizations around the world. OAW serves as an opportunity for academic and research communities to come together to not only recognize open access as it exists today, but to learn about the benefits of increasing open access across academic research.
While journal articles and books are well known research outputs that can be made open access, data can also be made available open access. At the University of Waterloo, the Library and Office of Research co-chair a research data management (RDM) working group that is bringing together the many resources accessible to scholars to help make their research data available.
Data repositories like the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) and Borealis are free to Waterloo scholars and help facilitate the creation of open access data. Both repositories are Canadian; depositing data into these repositories generates a persistent identifier which works towards making data open access and findable to other people.
The Library’s Research Data Management guide has helpful resources for learning more about how to deposit data and how it can be made open access. Specific questions can be sent to LibraryRDM@uwaterloo.ca.
