Advancing "open science" — the worldwide movement to increase the transparency and accessibility of publicly funded research — is one of UC Santa Barbara Library’s four strategic priorities. Yet, fostering reproducibility, data reuse and interdisciplinary collaboration can be challenging across a large, complex research university.
The Library completed several key initiatives to promote open science at UCSB during the 2025–2026 academic year. As part of the Library’s strategic initiative, an interdepartmental team inventoried the Library’s campuswide open science efforts, revealing a rich interconnection of Library expertise across multiple departments that is transforming how researchers manage data. Additionally, the Research Data Services (RDS) Department deepened its integration into the graduate programs offered by the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management by developing the data management portions of the programs’ curricula, directly instructing students on data science topics and supporting the preservation of final group projects.
This multipronged approach has fostered a collaborative campus ecosystem. The Library regularly joins forces with other campus units to host workshops and events on open science-related topics — such as research data management, data visualization and data science best practices — which draw students from across disciplines. Beyond the STEM fields, the Library collaborates directly with humanities departments to integrate data analysis and information management techniques into humanistic research methodologies. The Library has also led UCSB’s ongoing participation in the UC-wide Open Source Program Office Network, bringing together open-source activities, expertise and community connections to build new support models for software licensing and project sustainability.
"By embedding open science directly into campus workflows and classes, the Library helps shatter traditional research barriers," said RDS Director Greg Janée. "This collaboration ensures that public research remains transparent, reproducible and ready to face the complexities of modern scientific research."
The increased use of AI tools in research raises critical questions regarding transparency and ethics in academic research, and the Library is now also developing institutional recommendations for the responsible and effective use of AI following open science principles.
What is Open Science?
Open science serves as a unifying umbrella to encompass scholarship that is reproducible, transparent and freely accessible through seven core facets:
- Open Access: Freely accessible scholarly publications and outputs
- Open Data: Research data shared for access and reuse
- Open Source: Software with openly available source code for reuse and modification
- Open Methodology: Transparent methods, protocols and workflows
- Open Educational Resources (OERs): Freely available teaching and learning materials
- Open Infrastructure: Shared systems supporting open scholarship
- Open Peer Review: Transparent peer review and evaluation processes
