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RIT's Open Programs Office
Open@RIT serves as RIT’s Open Programs Office and is a key research center of the university.
As part of the Office of the Vice President of Research since 2020, our office’s goals are to discover and grow the footprint of RIT’s impact on all things Open, including but not limited to Open Source Software, Open Data, Open Science, Open Hardware, Open Educational Resources, and Creative Commons licensed efforts. We refer to these in aggregate as Open Work.
What We Offer
Faculty and Staff
We offer support for:
- Educational resources
- Contributing to open projects
- Disseminating open work
- Representing open work in evaluation, renure, and promotion
- Grant writing for open scholarship dissemination and community development
Students
We support formal classes alongside an immersion and a minor. We also provide support to student groups interested in open work, co-ops, and part time work when funds allow.
Best Practices
Our recommended best practices surrounding contributing and disseminating open work.
Why Open Work
Be it in Technology, Science research, or simple economic growth and digital infrastructure — the world runs on Open Work, often through the auspices of Open Source Programs Office (OSPO).
For example:
- We saw the rapid development of COVID Vaccines is due to Open Research Data and Open Science practices.
- The internet operates on Open Standards and Open Source Software
- The Human Genome Project alone generated a return of $141 for each federal dollar spent and created 310,000 jobs in its first 20 years.
The benefits of Open Work have become so clear that the majority of funders, from foundations to the Federal government now require that your work be Open licensed. The same holds true in the arts and humanities as well as in science and technology.
History
Open@RIT’s roots go back to 2009 with our first honors course in developing educational games for the One Laptop Per Child program.
From that, we added more courses, an affinity group, a co-op program now called LibreCorps in 2012, and the first academic minor in Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture in 2014. We introduced the idea of Open@RIT to our administration as an office and research center to support Open Work across the RIT campus and community in 2019, and Open@RIT was approved and officially opened its doors in August 2020.
For a much more detailed description, with lots of links to articles and documents that cover some of the milestone moments, you can read the piece Birth of an Academic OSPO (2021) that we wrote with the Linux Foundation.