Research as Information Creation

As you move forward in your academic career – as a researcher, creating new information from others' previous works – it is your responsibility to understand and exercise agency over your own research conduct.

"Science has the power to illuminate, but not to solve, the deeper problems of mankind. For always after knowledge come choice and action, both of them intensely personal."

Professor Paul B. Sears, University of Oklahoma
Deserts on the March (Bizzell Memorial Library GF 503 .S42 1980)

Your research activities at OU are governed by preexisting ethical and legal systems. When the intellectual property of others – and even your own if it is from a previous project or assignment – informs your research, responsible and integritous academic conduct means providing attribution and accurate citations. In today's world, conversations about intellectual property and how we conduct research are enriched by collaboration and the sharing of resources between researchers, too, like Open movements or data reuse and licensing. 

Thankfully, OU provides resources to help you navigate these foundations of scholarship:

• Academic Integrity at the University of Oklahoma: OU.edu/integrity
• OU Libraries Tutorials: Citations & Academic Integrity
• OU Libraries LibGuides: 
  • Creative Commons - Copyright & Licenses
  • Plagiarism... and how to avoid it
• OU Undergraduate Student Handbook
• OU Graduate Student Handbook
• OU Faculty Handbook
• OU Staff Policies and Handbooks

• What is Copyright? from the U.S. Copyright Office
• Open Science Framework (OSF) is a free and open-source project management tool and data repository, run by the Center for Open Science. Its flexible file and contributor structure makes it great for managing individual projects, for lab management and protocol storage, and for collaborations. You can link it to services you already use in your projects such as github, Dropbox, or Google Drive, while keeping those documents linked all from one central location easily sharable with collaborators. OSF has great introductory materials, including written tutorials online.  If you'd like to contact a Research Data Specialist or a Science Librarian about OSF or data management, please visit our open office hours weekdays 1-3pm at Data Services Zoom office hours or contact us for an appointment.
• Data Analytics and Visualization is a research guide created by Science Librarian Claire Curry to provide information and resources to those working with research data.
  • Citation vs. Attribution
  • Attribution vs. Citation: Do you know the difference?
  • Don't Attribute Open Data, Cite It! 
  • Introduction to Intellectual Property Rights in Data Management – "This fact sheet provides a brief overview of some of the issues associated with managing IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] in data projects." This document is a great way to understand why you might want to use an Open Data License instead of Creative Commons and how these are different from software licenses.
• Rein in the four horsemen of irreproducibility – Nature World View article, "Dorothy Bishop describes how threats to reproducibility, recognized but unaddressed for decades, might finally be brought under control."
• Reproducibility and Replicability in Science
• World Bank Group Library Guide: Open Science and Citizen Science