Research resources cost a lot and add to the increasing costs of higher education. As an individual student or as part of a student organization, you can inform and encourage others to consider Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education options.
What can students do to support OA in their education and their future careers?
- Advocate for the use of Open Textbooks and Open Educational Resources in your courses--ones you enroll in and ones you teach
- Deposit course papers, presentations, theses, dissertations, and other works you create in an Open Access repository, such as D-Scholarship@Pitt, or one specific to your discipline
- Apply Creative Commons licensing to your scholarship so that others can easily share and reuse your works (while still giving you credit and allowing you to retain ownership of your work)
- Take control of your copyrights--ask for the right to self-archive your articles as part of your publishing agreements
- Read your publishing agreements carefully and know which rights you want to keep
- Get involved in creating, reviewing for, or serving on the editorial board of a student scholarly Open Access journal
- Publish in an Open Access journal in your discipline
- Use Pitt's Open Access Author Fee Fund to help offset the cost of publishing in in an OA journal
- Ask granting agencies for funds to support article processing charges for OA journals
- Deposit your data in an OA repository
- Talk about Open Access with your fellow students, advisors, and professors and discuss how Open Access can impact your research and career
- Participate in Open Access Week events at Pitt
