Organize a few friends (or strangers) and work on making research and education openly available together! This could look like uploading your research into your institutional repository, planning an event together for Open Access Week, Open Education Week, or Open Data Day; or working on a bigger, long-term group initiative.
Upload-a-thon
Gather with a group of other academics and put any papers you have published in your library’s institutional repository. Consider teaching others who may not know how to - or may not understand why they should - deposit their work on why it’s important and how to do it.
Make your Research Open
Even if you don’t have any published papers yet, there are other ways you can make your research open. We’d love for you to get together with your labmates, colleagues or friends to familiarize yourself with (and begin using!) open research / data-sharing tools like Open Science Framework, or FigShare.
Plan an Event
Do people on your campus or in your community know about Open issues? Get a small team together to organize an information table, a workshop, or a panel discussion. Open Access Week happens in October, Open Data Day usually happens in February, and Open Education Week is in March. These times are great opportunities to host events (small or large!) to bring awareness and educate people around open issues, but we also encourage people to host events any time of the year!
Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Get your laptops out and work together on increasing the quality and quantity of information about Open Access, Open Data or Open Education on Wikipedia. For an idea of what an this can look like, check out the edit-a-thon from Open Access Week 2015.
Write a blog post
Get a few people together to collectively work on a blog post - or perhaps a series of blog posts - about open issues to share with your community. You can post it on your own blog, your institution’s website, or on our upcoming OpenCon community blog.
Contribute to RPT Research Project
A group of OpenCon alumni are conducting a research project to learn how open practices are considered in the RPT (Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure) evaluations across universities. Ask faculty to connect you with a copy of the RPT guidelines in your university (and/or your department) and upload them here.
This is important because RPT guidelines around openness could motivate academic behavioural changes, which in turn, would ideally lead to a shift in interest and adoption of open access principles. This is a really concrete way to advance openness, and you can help out! Contribute to this project by uploading any department’s or institutions RPT guidelines/forms or answering some questions about them.
Ambitious? Work on a Big Project!
Amazing things can get done when you’re working with a team. Meet-ups can be a great way to get a group of people together to brainstorm and work on an initiative that helps make research and information open. Examples of projects that have been supported by the OpenCon community include the Open Access Button, Open Access Nepal, Open Access Nigeria,the OOOCanada Research Network, WhyOpenResearch?, the Open Access Academy, Dissem.in, the Open Research Glossary, and many more. Check out these projects to get inspired - and let us know if you’re working on anything exciting!
Interested in, or planning to host a work party to advance Open?
Register to set up an event on the site, or to keep us posted on your activities!