The UNC Open Source Research Team (OSRT) was created to provide an outlet for research into information sharing communities and their accompanying digital archives. Many of these communities revolve around the creation of computer software based on the Open Source development model, and while OSRT is very interested in these types of communities, it also seeks to extend its research into other information-sharing communities who model their behaviors on those of the Open Source Software movement.

OSRT supports these research goals by publishing and distributing quantitative and qualitative studies of content contributions and contributors; by helping to facilitate experimental advanced distributions of Open Source resources; by maintaining and managing Open Source archives; by enhancing methods for the searching and retrieval of archived resources; by designing and implementing metadata standards for documentation searching and retrieval; through the hosting of Open Source projects; and by mirroring and distributing Open Source resources.

The members of the Open Source Research Team are dispersed all over the world, but many members are affiliated with the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and ibiblio.