Open Work in Academia
Be it in Technology (the Internet runs on Open Standards and Open Source Software), Science (the rapid development of COVID Vaccines is due to Open Research Data and Open Science practices), or simple Economic Growth (the Human Genome Project alone generated a return of $141 for each federal dollar spent and created 310,000 jobs in its first 20 years), the world runs on Open Work.
The benefits of Open Work have become so clear that the majority of funders, from foundations to the Federal government now require that your work be Open licensed. The same holds true in the arts and humanities as well as in science and technology.
We can help you to:
Understand
- The impacts of those requirements on your work
- What it means for licensing, disseminating, and distributing it.
- Internal Champions and why they are often required by Industry Foundations
- How to find others doing open work in your area
- How to join and contribute to an existing community
- How to engage with programs that supply funded interns to Open projects.
Act
- Design outreach and support materials as well as campaigns
- Find tools and infrastructure that will best support your Open Work communities
- Find Internal Champions that are often required by Industry Foundations
- Design processes and resources to help build and sustain your community
- Build and manage teams to develop your projects
If all externally funded work needs to be Open, the clearer and more intentional you can be in writing a proposal that emphasizes your ability to be impactful and sustainable around your Open Work the better your edge when you’re up for consideration.
At a minimum, Open@RIT can give you pointers on the language for that section of your proposal. Need more assistance? Just as you write external evaluators into your grants, you can write the services of Open@RIT into your grants to develop your Open dissemination plans, frameworks, pipelines, the creation and even the management and sustainability of the community of Open researchers and contributors you hope to develop once you’re funded.