"Iowa State University will create, share, and apply knowledge to make our students, Iowa, and the world better.
Iowa State University will advance the land-grant ideals of putting science, technology, and human creativity to work."
We are dedicated to creating services and using our resources to benefit Iowans and the world by pursuing an ideal where everyone has access to online scholarly information. This ideal is called openness and is named after the Open Access Movement which aims to make online research publications free to access and reuse.
Our open initiatives
Our innovative services make ISU-authored articles, data, theses and dissertations, and teaching materials available to the world.
- Open Scholarship: We provide an open access collection of Iowa State University scholarship through our digital repository.
- Open Data: We support the responsible management and sharing of research data and oversee DataShare, the university’s open access data repository.
We provide services that support open access books, textbooks, articles, and journals so that everyone can read and use professional and reliable online information.
- Open Journal Articles: We provide education and support for open access publishing, including negotiating with publishers to eliminate fees for ISU authors.
- Open Education: We help ISU instructors create and adopt open educational materials such as textbooks and instructional videos.
- Open Publishing: Our Digital Press publishes original, open access books, journals, and conference proceedings from scholars from around the world.
We invest in organizations and services that support open science and scholarship to broaden the impact of the scholarly work produced at ISU and to allow our students and researchers to access online scholarly information without charge.
- Open Investments: See what and who we support in our effort to make the publishing ecosystem open and fair.
Our dedication and progress
You can learn more about this by reading OpenISU, where we share our thoughts and research, and by reviewing our formative documents.
- Criteria for Support of Open Investments (2022)
- University Library Open Access Commitment (2024)
- Principles for Advancing Openness through Journal Negotiations (2019)
- Faculty Senate Open Access Resolution (2017) (PDF)
Questions about these services and initiatives can be sent to
