openpractice

Open practice is a term used to describe professional approaches and workflows that are openly shared, documented, and collaboratively improved. It spans disciplines from science and education to design and software development. The aim is to reduce opacity in methods and outputs, enabling others to understand, reuse, audit, and build upon work. While the exact practices vary by field, the core idea is openness as a default posture rather than an exception.

Common elements include open licensing, public documentation of methods, and the deliberate sharing of data, protocols, and artifacts. Examples include open lab notebooks, open educational resources, open data repositories, preregistered studies, open peer review, and open-source software. Implementations often rely on community norms, governance, and infrastructure that support collaboration and attribution.

Benefits include improved reproducibility, faster innovation, broader participation, and greater accountability. Challenges include protecting privacy and sensitive information, managing intellectual property, ensuring quality and sustainability, and aligning incentives in professional cultures that prize secrecy or proprietary outputs.

Open practice is closely linked to movements such as open science, open education, and open data. It is not a single standardized framework but a set of principles that various organizations adapt to their contexts.