Research Data Management

What is Open Access?

"Open access" is free unrestricted online access to scientific and scholarly publications. The University’s policies on open access publishing, as laid out in the UC Systemwide Academic Senate Open Access Policy and UC Presidential Open Access Policy, align well with most federal grant requirements. Authors have two main options to comply:

• Best practice is to make the final published journal article open access. More than half of all articles by UC authors are now eligible for funding support through UC’s transformative open access agreements with a range of scholarly publishers. The university will typically pay the first $1,000 of the open access fee (also known as an article processing charge, or APC) automatically; if the author does not have research funds available to cover the remainder, UC will pay the full amount in most cases.
• Deposit the author’s manuscript into an open access article repository such as PubMed Central, or use the UC Publication Management System to deposit into UC’s eScholarship repository.

For more information on publishing open access journal articles, visit Publishing Open Access at UC Davis.

What is Open Data?

"Open data" is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone—subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike (Open Data Handbook). Open scientific data focuses on the primary research data published within or alongside scientific and scholarly publications.

There are many options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication, including government-sponsored repositories, disciplinary repositories, and third-party repositories.

What is Open Science?

Open Science (or Open Knowledge) encompasses a growing set of practices that make scholarly output (publications, data, code, protocols, etc.) more accessible, transparent, reliable, and inclusive to all levels of an inquiring society. The underlying rationale is that openness increases the quality, efficiency, and impact of science.

With more than a dozen federal agencies and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy celebrating 2023 as a Year of Open Science, emphasis on sharing research openly continues to grow.