What is the OSC?
Our Mission
The Open Scholarship Commons is an interdisciplinary set of spaces and services intended to advance open, public, and emerging forms of scholarship. It provides opportunities for scholars, creators, and learners from diverse backgrounds to learn from each other and build the skills necessary to co-create, share, translate, and make the impact of their research visible to the world.
How do we do this?
We bring visibility to our network of partners inside the Libraries and across Seattle campus supporting open scholarship and community-engaged practice by highlighting and co-developing workshops, events, and consultation services; bringing open scholarship skills to the classroom, and promoting projects celebrating open, collaborative work.
We offer skills in copyright and open licensing, open education and open pedagogy, open science and open data, data management, digital scholarship, open publishing, metadata construction, and research impact support along with critical making expertise.
Values
These values guide our work:
Equity: Accessibility is core to the creation of open scholarships, and the OSC aims to provide equitable access to technology, tools, support, and information that facilitate knowledge creation and mobilization. Its design considers the needs of users who have historically been marginalized in knowledge production and in technology-heavy research spaces.
Experimentation: The OSC embraces change and seeks to grow and improve its services over time through prototyping and iteration. By encouraging staff and users to take risks and embrace failure, it creates space for innovation and creative solutions to community needs.
Flexibility: The OSC support s a variety of work styles including individual work, large and small group work, work with technology, low-tech brainstorming, making, and more.
Openness: The OSC supports the open sharing of research and encourages and enhances users’ ability to learn, practice, network and connect, teach, and produce openly in the context of their field and work. It values reproducibility and clarity in how openly published scholarship produced at UW can be used as a platform to grow future scholarship.
Technology: The OSC space provides and supports core and cutting-edge technologies that open scholarship to new audiences, collaborations, and projects. Over time, its technologies will change and adapt to reflect or further the state of open scholarship.
More Information
OSC in the News