A Brief History of a University’s Open Programs Office and its Best Practices for Contribution and Licensing
Friday, April 17, 2026
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Hinds Hall 347
Professor Stephen Jacobs was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create Open@RIT, based on over a decade of teaching students to engage in Open Work in formal classroom education and experiential programs. Open@RIT, RIT’s Open Programs office, was established to support faculty, staff, and student efforts in all forms of Open Work. From 2020-2024, the two grants supported two full-time staff and a rotating team of co-ops to provide faculty support for their Open Work. As part of this work, they developed a set of “Best Practices” for Open Work on contributing to other projects, disseminating and licensing Open Work projects, and representing Open Work in Evaluation, Tenure, and Promotion. In this session, Jacobs will provide a brief history of Open@RIT and go through the best practices they developed for Open Academic Work.
Stephen Jacobs is a former Professor of the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the former Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded Open@RIT. During his 30 years at RIT, Professor Stephen Jacobs was an original author of the RIT MS and BS in Game Design and Development, Created and Directed Open@RIT and was a Founding Associate Director of RIT’s MAGIC Center and MAGIC Spell Studios. Now retired, Jacobs remains a Scholar-in-Residence at The Strong National Museum of Play, a position he’s held since 2007. He also remains active in several Open Source and Academic Research Assessment efforts.
