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Open Science & Open Scholarship

Open Science is a global research reform movement and a set of scholarly practices that aims to make more research transparent and accessible

Open Research Software

Open Research Software refers to the software, code, and scripts that researchers use to analyze data, run simulations, visualize results, or manage their research workflows, when this software is made publicly available under an open license.

This means that the source code is accessible for anyone to view, download, use, modify, and distribute. By making research software open, the aim is to increase the transparency and reproducibility of computational research. If the software used to generate results is openly available, other researchers can inspect how the analysis was performed, verify the findings, and even adapt the software for their own work.

Examples of Open Research Software

Programming Languages & Environments

  • R: Widely used for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphics. RStudio is a popular integrated development environment (IDE) for R, also available as open source.  
  • Python: A versatile language with extensive libraries (like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-learn) for data analysis, machine learning, scientific computing, and more. Jupyter Notebooks (now part of Project Jupyter, which includes JupyterLab) are open-source interactive computing environments often used with Python and R

Data Analysis & Visualization

  • OpenRefine: A powerful tool for cleaning and transforming messy data.   
  • KNIME: An open-source platform for data integration, processing, analysis, and exploration, using a visual workflow approach.   
  • Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly (with open components): Popular Python libraries for creating static, interactive, and publication-quality visualizations.   
  • Gephi: An open-source platform for visualizing and exploring graphs and networks

Reference Management:

  • Zotero: A free, open-source tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research.
  • JabRef: An open-source bibliography reference manager, particularly popular with LaTeX users.

These are just a few examples, as the landscape of open research software is constantly evolving with new tools being developed and shared across different research communities.

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This work by The University of Victoria Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License unless otherwise indicated when material has been used from other sources.