The Open Research Toolkit was created by the Open Research Working Group, comprising representatives of the Australasian Research Management Society (ARMS) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). The Toolkit supports Australasian institutions to implement or further develop open research policy, strategy and practice.
The Toolkit contains information, resources and good practice examples related to all aspects of open research, including policy, governance, pathways and processes. It also includes resources for individual researchers interested in engaging in open research practices and training materials for support services fostering open research within their organisations.
For further information about how the Toolkit was created, see About the Toolkit.
'Open Research extends the principles of Open Access publishing to the whole research cycle, inclusive of research protocols, data, code, software, and much more. It is about being as open as possible, as often as possible, and only being as closed as is necessary. It encompasses all disciplines and types of research. Through planning many elements of the research lifecycle can be made open, transparent, and reproducible.'
In the context of this Toolkit, the term ‘open research’ includes but is not limited to open access publications, FAIR data, FAIR software and code. Many of the examples in the Toolkit focus on open access to research publications.
The concept of open access in the context of publications is well developed. Making outputs like data and software open is more complex, and the FAIR principles are a very useful way of describing how to make these outputs reusable in a valuable manner. The underlying FAIR principle of ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’ remains the same across each domain.
Except where otherwise noted, all content on the Open Research Toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) licence. Under the licence conditions, please attribute Open Research Toolkit.