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strong evidence for the effect. This effect may provide a critical advantage in the tenure pro-
cess for academics providing “aggressive open access,” depending on the university.
2.1.4 Increased funding opportunities and improved student
recruitment
This exposure can directly lead to funding opportunities. An example of this includes one of
the research projects highlighted as part of this open-research experiment. The project looked
at the effects of snow on solar photovoltaic (PV) performance. As per the dictates of the open
experiment, we published our research plans on Appropedia. Due to the Appropedia posting
of the details of the experiment as it was underway, the project page received the top rank in
Google searches related to snow and PV technology. This exposure resulted in a successful
open-source partnership being formed between 20 organizations, all of which directly contrib-
uted funding, equipment and in-kind support to produce the Open Solar Outdoors Test Field
(OSOTF) ( Figure 2.2 ), which provides critical data and research in the public domain for solar
PV systems' optimization in snowy environments [ 14 ] . Unlike many other projects, the OSOTF
is organized under open-source principles guided by the hacker ethic. All data and analyses
when completed are made freely available to the entire PV technical community and to the
general public, and already much of the data including real-time photos of the OSOTF are
available in 5 min increments live. 12 The collaborating partners in the OSOTF project were will-
ing to overcome the challenges of doing open-source research because they saw value in hav-
ing free access to critical research data that would be useful for product improvement, more
reliable predictions of performance for funding, and reductions in solar electric system losses.
It is clear from the number of collaborators who contacted the group that many of the partners
would never have known about the project without the group using the open-source research
approach. In addition, the coverage assisted in atracting high-quality domestic graduate stu-
dent researchers.
 
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