Accessibility: Making your research accessible online

  

  

In Weeks 2 to 5 of this course, you have explored two key principles of open research: transparency and integrity. Now let’s turn to the third principle of accessibility. Accessibility is crucial, because knowledge generation is a collective endeavour, funded at least in part by taxpayers, and so everyone has a right to the knowledge that is generated. For this short course, accessibility will be discussed in the context of journal manuscripts, while acknowledging that research can also be made accessible through many other outputs.

Accessible research in this context means ensuring that all who are interested can consume, evaluate, and otherwise interact with research products and processes. Even if research is transparent and has integrity, if only certain people can access the research products, it is not truly open.