Open Access Policies and Scholarly Communication

The Library of Congress launched By the People (crowd.loc.gov) in the autumn of 2018. The application invites you to transcribe, review, and tag digitized images of manuscripts and typed materials from the Library’s collections. Everyone is welcome to take part! You don't even need to create an account, but if you do you'll have access to additional features such as tagging, and reviewing other people's transcriptions. All transcriptions are made and reviewed by volunteers before they are returned to loc.gov, the Library's website. These transcriptions will improve search, readability, and access to handwritten and typed documents for those who are not fully sighted or cannot read the handwriting of the original documents. Check out the FAQs section in our Help Center for more detailed information.

The Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists records are part of Series 12: Peace, of the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers at Oregon State University Libraries and Press. When Albert Einstein died in 1955, his personal ECAS files were turned over to Frank Aydelotte, the director of Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein worked in his final years. Upon Aydelotte’s death shortly thereafter, Einstein’s personal files were sent by Aydelotte's family to Linus Pauling for preservation.

Milner Library has partnered with From the Page, a crowdsourced transcription service, to transcribe hundreds of handwritten historical documents, such as diary entries, postcards, letters, and photo captions. These documents are important parts of Milner’s collections, bringing history to life in the words of those who lived it.

DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. Our digital library holds hundreds of thousands of items—much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so we're appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments. Through "crowdsourcing," or engaging volunteers to contribute effort toward large-scale goals, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts become searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily. Please join us in preserving our past by keeping the historic record accessible—one page or picture at a time.

Welcome to our Citizen Archivist program. With the help of our virtual volunteers, we are increasing online access to the historical records of the National Archives. Join us! You can help crowdsource metadata and information about our records through tagging, transcribing and adding comments in the National Archives Catalog. Together we can make the records of the National Archives more discoverable online.

Building Inspector
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“Our Marathon” is a crowd-sourced archive of pictures, videos, stories, and even social media related to the Boston Marathon; the bombing on April 15, 2013; the subsequent search, capture, and trial of the individuals who planted the bombs; and the city’s healing process. “Our Marathon” will allow the public to explore not only what happened during the event, but also how the event was experienced by Bostonians, visitors to the city, and those many members of the “Boston diaspora” who were far away but deeply engaged in the unfolding events. The archive will serve as a long-term memorial, preserving these records for students and researchers, providing future historians with invaluable, local windows into an important national event.

Become a Smithsonian Digital Volunteer and help us make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible.

‘Many hands make light work. Many hands together make merry work‘, wrote the philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) in 1793.

In this spirit, we cordially welcome you to Transcribe Bentham, a double award-winning collaborative transcription initiative, which is digitising and making available digital images of Bentham’s unpublished manuscripts.

Citizen science is the involvement of the public in scientific research – whether community-driven research or global investigations. The Citizen Science Association unites expertise from educators, scientists, data managers, and others to power citizen science. Join us, and help speed innovation by sharing insights across disciplines.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the world contribute bird observations to the Cornell Lab each year, gathering data on a scale once unimaginable. Scientists use these data to determine how birds are affected by habitat loss, pollution, disease, and climate change. They trace bird migration and document long-term changes in bird numbers, creating species-specific conservation plans and targeted action to help birds find the resources they need to survive.

Welcome to GLOBE Observer, an international citizen science initiative to understand our global environment. Your observations help scientists track changes in clouds, water, plants, and other life in support of climate research. Scientists also use your data to verify NASA satellite data. And by submitting your observations, you can help students of all ages do real scientific research as part of the GLOBE Program. To participate, just download the app, go outside and follow the prompts in the app to observe your environment.

Get ideas for how you can participate in citizen science—projects in which volunteers and scientists work together to answer real-world questions and gather data.

Citizen naturalists are people concerned about the environment who choose to help make a difference both locally and nationally. They spend time outside, observing nature with a critical lens.

We are network of collaborators trying to keep track and curate interesting open source projects related to neurosciences.

Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns.

Help make science happen by volunteering for a real research project.

SciStarter connects you to thousands of projects in need of your help.

The Zooniverse is the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. This research is made possible by volunteers—hundreds of thousands of people around the world who come together to assist professional researchers. Our goal is to enable research that would not be possible, or practical, otherwise. Zooniverse research results in new discoveries, datasets useful to the wider research community, and many publications.

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux, or Android) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It's safe, secure, and easy.

Bossa is an open-source software framework for distributed thinking - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that use human cognition, knowledge, or intelligence.

Bossa minimizes the effort of creating and operating a distributed thinking project. It provides a project web site, hosted on your Linux server, where volunteers go to perform tasks and to interact with other volunteers. All you need to supply are PHP scripts to generate, show, and handle tasks.

Citizenscience.gov is an official government website designed to accelerate the use of crowdsourcing and citizen science across the U.S. government. The site provides a portal to three key assets for federal practitioners: a searchable catalog of federally supported citizen science projects, a toolkit to assist with designing and maintaining projects, and a gateway to a federal community of practice to share best practices.

If you have an interest in openness, open education, research skills or want to find out more about the impact of Open Educational Resources (OER), then this resource is for you.