What is Open Science?
Open Science is a movement that aims to make scientific research and its dissemination accessible to all levels of society—amateurs or professionals. It promotes transparency, collaboration, and accessibility in the research process by encouraging practices such as open access publishing, sharing of data and code, and public engagement in scientific inquiry.
For students and researchers in STEM, Open Science is especially valuable. It allows greater access to cutting-edge research without paywalls, supports reproducibility through shared data and methodologies, and fosters global collaboration. By participating in or utilizing Open Science resources, STEM learners can stay current with developments in their field, contribute to broader knowledge-sharing, and build research practices rooted in openness and integrity.
To learn more about the Open Science movement and access more Open Science resources check out the following websites:
Open Access Research
Access to quality data is essential for research, experimentation, and analysis in STEM fields. Open access research is research that is freely available research that anyone can use, share, and study, without subscription or payment barriers. These assets support transparency, reproducibility, and innovation by allowing students and researchers to explore real-world data, test hypotheses, and develop data-driven projects.
Below, you’ll find a curated list of places where you can find open access datasets, preprints, and other tools relevant to various STEM disciplines—from biology and engineering to computer science and environmental science.
Datasets
- Data.gov: Data.gov provides access to open data from the U.S. federal government.
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data Repositories: NIH Data Repositories host a wide range of biomedical research data for public access and reuse.
- PubChem: PubChem offers a comprehensive database of chemical molecules and their activities against biological assays.
- Science.gov: Science.gov searches over 2,200 scientific websites from U.S. government agencies.
- Environmental Data Initiative: The Environmental Data Initiative supports the archiving and sharing of environmental data.
- DataONE: DataONE enables discovery, access, and citation of Earth and environmental science data.
- NSF NEON: NSF NEON provides continental-scale ecological data collected from standardized field sites across the United States.
- GBIF: GBIF offers free and open access to biodiversity data from around the world.
- GlOBI: GlOBI is a global index of biological interactions
Other
- OpenStax: OpenStax provides free, peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks for college and high school courses.
- Preprints**: Preprints.org is a multidisciplinary preprint platform for sharing early versions of research outputs.
- arXiv**: arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
- bioRxiv**: bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.
- ChemRxiv**: ChemRxiv is a preprint server for sharing unpublished and research in chemistry.
- ChemSynthesis: ChemSynthesis is a database dedicated to providing information regarding chemical synthesis.
**Note: Preprints are not yet peer-reviewed. Preprints are a way for researchers to share their current work with the scientific community. They can be valuable to see what kind of research is being done in a particular field.
