Creative Commons image by Neil Crosby via Flickr

Editors’ Choice: Another Step in Keeping Pledges

Long-time readers of this blog might remember that, a while ago, I pledged to do pretty much Open Everything. Last week, a friend in my department asked how I managed that without having people steal my ideas. It’s a tough question, and I’m still not certain whether my answer has more to do with idealist naïveté or actual forward-thought. Time will tell. As it is, the pool of people doing similar work to mine is small, and they pretty much all know about this blog, so I’m confident the crowd of rabid academics will keep each other in check. Still, I suppose we all have to be on guard for the occasional evil professor, wearing his white lab coat, twirling his startling mustachio,  and just itching to steal the idle musings of a still-very-confused Ph.D. student.

In the interest of keeping up my pledge, I’ve decided to open up yet another document, this time for the purpose of student guidance. In 2010, I applied for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a shockingly well-paying program that’ll surely help with the rising (and sometimes prohibitive) costs of graduate school. By several strokes of luck and (I hope) a decent project, the NSF sent the decision to fund me later that year, and I’ve had more time to focus on research ever since. In the interest of helping future applicants, I’ve posted my initial funding proposal on figshare. Over the next few weeks, there are a few other documents and datasets I plan on making public, and I’ll start a new page on this blog that consolidates all the material that I’ve opened, inspired by Ted Underwood’s similar page.

Click to get my NSF proposal.

Do you have grants or funding applications that’ve been accepted? Do you have publications out that are only accessible behind a drastic paywall? I urge you to post preprints, drafts, or whatever else you can to make scholarship a freer and more open endeavor for the benefit of all.

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: