HELIOS Open 2024 Programming and Structures
Vision: A community of U.S. higher education leaders engaged in collective action to advance open scholarship recognition, rewards, and resources to support open practices by default.
Values: We are working together to promote a more transparent, inclusive, equitable, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
High-Level Overview of 2024 Programming and Structures
HELIOS Open Community Calls every 6-8 weeks with the entire community.
These are opportunities to engage the entirety of the HELIOS Open network 1) to identify open scholarship focus areas that motivate and animate institutions, 2) to offer a medium for institutions with like interests to connect, and 3) to provide a path forward for identifying support structures to facilitate member collaborations that advance HELIOS Open goals.
Member Representative Advisory Council with shifting membership, annually. The goal is to have a community of HELIOS Open ambassadors that can advise and identify community-led opportunities for the HELIOS Open members to advance work, and then develop tangible next steps including milestones and deliverables for any proposed projects.
Working Groups and Affinity Groups will shift to mission-focused small group work that can form, storm, accomplish, and then return back into the larger overall community group. These will be community-led.
Quarterly dialogues between federal agencies and HELIOS Open leadership in the research office to establish direct communication channels with the federal agencies as they implement public access plans and as colleges and universities are thinking through compliance, infrastructure, and funding needs related to open scholarship and public access to research.
Senior Leadership Advisory Council. This group will identify and advise on higher education’s open scholarship opportunities and assess and provide feedback on HELIOS Open work as it supports the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship and leadership goals.
Higher Education Leaders Convene to Explore Modernizing Hiring, Review, Promotion and Tenure to Explicitly Reward Open Scholarship
Fifty high-level college and university decision makers met on January 10 and 11 to discuss what they could do collectively to encourage open practices by changing incentive structures on campus. They collaborated at a workshop funded by NASA and hosted by Florida International University, in collaboration with HELIOS Open. The presidents, provosts, and vice provosts for faculty and research shared ideas about strategies for rewarding researchers’ open scholarship activities in structures and processes including tenure, promotion, review, and hiring. Many attendees agreed that updating tenure and promotion is one of the hardest institutional tasks, but that culture change is needed to achieve a more transparent, inclusive, and open incentives system.
Danny Anderson, President Emeritus, Trinity University, facilitated the meeting. After sharing remarks from HELIOS Open leadership, including Geeta Swamy, and recorded remarks from presidents Ron Daniels and Michael Crow, Anderson shared information about national and international efforts that advance open scholarship incentives, including the National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. Dr. Anderson also shared existing resources that could support leaders interested in taking action to enable change at their institutions. Recognizing how difficult it can be to enact new policies and navigate shared governance, he described useful models for complex change. Anderson encouraged campus leaders to be intentional, rather than reactive, and focus on the desired outcome when crafting their action plans.
Anderson asked attendees to form small groups to address the following questions related to changing processes and procedures to advance open scholarship incentives:
Where are you as academic leaders putting your attention– on problems that make you reactive or on outcomes you can achieve?
How are you relating to your campus? Are you taking on a reactive mindset or an outcomes mindset?
What actions are you taking based on your mindset?
Attendees received a handout with potential campus leadership actions suggested by the faculty and staff involved in HELIOS Open.
When the group reconvened , attendees reflected on faculty perceptions, realities, and needs related to career advancement, personal and professional values leaders should uphold in their policies and procedures, and how open scholarship can support faculty in career advancement. Participants explored their role in enabling change and brainstormed opportunities to replace archaic incentive structures. One attendee asked, “if something is open and freely accessible, can we start to ask how faculty are using it in their work to see where the work has grown and how it has led to breakthroughs?”
Next, a panel of federal agency representatives joined both virtually and in-person to share their intersecting goals for inter-agency coordination efforts on open science and public access. Marking the anniversary of the federal Year of Open Science, and what it might look like to enter an era of open science, it was clear that higher education leaders and federal agency representatives are eager to continue conversations with one another to ensure scholarship is transparent, accessible, efficient, and secure.
By the end of the day, the attendees suggested resources they might need to take action at their institutions, and brainstormed next steps to support faculty’s open scholarship activities, including:
Talking points to get faculty at all levels on board with change
Information about what types of (open and accessible) scholarly products, potentially those that are non-traditional, should and could be assessed
Better instructions (narrative documents) for external reviewers, and memorandums of understanding between departments and faculty describing how scholars would like their open scholarship activities to count in career advancement
Tips for creating a better onboarding process - one that includes better representation of open scholarship values and practices
More opportunities to connect with campus leaders to develop tangible action plans
The HELIOS Open network will continue to propel collective action in developing open scholarship incentives and to enable change.
Updated Name for HELIOS Open
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship is sharing news about a tweak to our “short” name. Moving forward, we will be going by the “HELIOS Open” moniker, rather than simply “HELIOS”.
We want to ensure our organization and work is easily disambiguated from other organizations with similar names. The best solution is to tweak our name to create a bit more distinction between organizations.
Going forward, we will be referring to our initiative in shorthand as HELIOS Open rather than HELIOS, and we ask our community to do the same.
Spotlight Series Recap: Generative AI and Open
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) hosted a Spotlight Series focused on generative artificial intelligence (AI) and open scholarship.
The World Economic Forum defines Generative AI as “a category of artificial intelligence algorithms that generate new outputs based on the data on they have been trained. Unlike traditional AI systems that are designed to recognize patterns and make predictions, generative AI creates new content in the form of images, text, audio, and more.” In 2023, generative AI has seemingly made the leap from a topic vaguely on our collective radars to everything everywhere all at once. ChatGPT has emerged as a tool for the masses, with questions raised about how peer reviewers, editors, and professors will be able to discern between human and machine generated papers. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, quit Google with a stark warning about the ethical implications of AI. A raft of headlines like “Why We're Worried about Generative AI” appeared in prominent publications like Scientific American. Intrepid analysis revealed that the training datasets for a number of AI models are surprisingly small, pulling from heterogeneous sources.
Higher education is becoming increasingly aware that these concepts are of direct relevance to their missions and their research, including their open scholarship priorities. Three experts in this emerging space shared their insights.
First, Dr. Katie Shilton, Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and co-PI of the new NIST-NSF Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS), explored ethical considerations of AI. For a long time, data has been a primary input of scholarship. Open scholarship has focused on making that data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) for other scholars. For generative AI, data is an input, but so are other research products like journal articles. The challenge is that Generative AI itself is not scholarship, but a replication of the language of scholarship. Data and papers are no longer only used to make predictions or new discoveries, but to feed large language models (LLM).
This establishes unprecedented ethical questions:
What are the right non-scientific generative uses of open scholarship?
What values or virtues do we want publicly-funded scholarship to support? How do we measure and track whether that is happening?
What roles do scholars play in managing the use of their scholarship?
Dr. Shilton posited that scholars may want to adopt open licenses that restrict their scholarship from some generative uses. There may be a need to develop licenses that require AI dashboards or other explanatory features, and FAIR data documentation practices are increasingly essential to support AI transparency.
Open scholarship is on the vanguard of these issues because open scholarship advocates are already thinking about the ethics of data sharing and can inform emerging norms. The principles this community develops, could guide content creators and generators as scholars and institutions navigate their relationships with generative AI tools and companies.
The NIST-NSF TRAILS Institute will support these efforts.
Dr. Susan Aaronson is also co-PI of the TRAILS program, Research Professor of international affairs and Director of the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub at George Washington University. Dr. Aaronson posed key questions at the start of her talk:
How did the firms or organizations creating LLM get their data to train their programs?
Did they follow internationally accepted rules regarding copyright and personal data protection?
Is the data accurate, complete, and representative of the world, its people and their cultures?
Have the firms considered interoperability, transparency, data sovereignty, and values?
Are there considerations for policymakers and activists related to the expropriation of resources (data) and paying additional rents to big tech companies located in the West and China?
Dr. Aaronson explored the governance and regulation concerns for policymakers, scholars, and the public. The markets for AI are growing rapidly, but China and the U.S. hold 94% of all AI funding, with 73% of generative AI firms based in the U.S. According to Aaronson, these firms often use open-source methods, but often rely on trade secrets to protect their algorithms and to control and reuse the data they analyze. Policymakers, researchers, and international bodies are starting to explore these challenges and opportunities.
Dr. Aaronson concluded with an exploration of how US and China’s competitiveness could threaten open practices like data sharing. There is a belief that openness empowers China, and that is worrying to some U.S. policymakers and companies; however, openness is a norm of science and can yield comparative advantage. Science cannot progress without data sharing and cooperation.
Dr. Molly Kleinman, Managing Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy program at the University of Michigan, shared thoughts on AI's potential implications for scientific research. She began by highlighting her main takeaway: generative AI is trained on the past, and can only reproduce the past. Because generative AI can only “know” what it has been trained on, it cannot make anything truly novel, which has implications for its use in the conduct of and evaluation of scientific research. It will be increasingly important to be able to evaluate what is generated from AI. Scientists and scientists in training should be educated early on what AI can and cannot do.
In scholarly communication, there are questions about AI and trust in science, trust on campuses between faculty and students, how AI will be used in peer review, along with concerns about rightful authorship, research evaluation in tenure and promotion, and intellectual property. One thing that generative AI is good at is boiling down large quantities of information into brief summaries, but it is not so good at citing its sources. Dr. Kleinman noted that these tools will privilege highly cited articles that may not represent the field’s diversity or most novel findings.
Using and feeding generative AI also risks reinforcing Western, especially Anglo-American, dominance in science. The more common generative AI becomes as a tool in science, the more it will continue to reinforce the English language as the language of science. It is reasonable to assume that already-marginalized scientists may worry their scholarship will be less visible in a world with global, popularized use of AI tools. The aforementioned issues may challenge open science and scholarship because of valid fears of exclusion and extraction.
Colleges and universities have a role to play in ensuring equity and inclusion are considered when AI is incorporated in scholarly processes like researcher evaluation and peer review.
Similarly, scholarly publishers can monetize AI tools for researchers based on publishers’ proprietary content, and sell that information back to institutions, or hold these tools hostage unless they subscribe to their journals. Given the current issue of monopolies in scientific publishing and a small number of for-profit publishers’ control over a large swath of scholarly content, this has financial and ethical implications for higher education.
We may see pressure on academic institutions to adopt and use generative AI to stay up to date with the trends, so Dr. Kleinman concluded by reemphasizing the importance of training scientists to think critically about, and recognize the limitations, of generative AI.
HELIOS Open Members Co-Author Research Software Policy Recommendations to Federal Agencies
A cohort of HELIOS Open member representatives have joined with other open source experts to author a PLOS Biology perspective, "Policy recommendations to ensure that research software is openly accessible and reusable". The piece provides policymaking guidance to federal agencies on leveraging research software to maximize research equity, transparency, and reproducibility. It makes the affirmative case that to accurately be able to replicate and reproduce results and build on shared data, we must not only have access to the data themselves, but also understand exactly how they were used and analyzed. To this end, federal agencies in the midst of developing their responses to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research” can and should ensure that research software is elevated as a core component of the scientific endeavor.
The perspective outlines seven policy recommendations, encompassing how research software should be shared, curated, maintained, secured, and redistributed. HELIOS Open thanks all of the co-authors for their contributions to this piece: Lorena Barba (George Washington University), Philip Bourne (University of Virginia), Caitlin Carter (ORFG), Zach Chandler (Stanford University), Sayeed Choudhury (Carnegie Mellon University), Stephen Jacobs (Rochester Institute of Technology), Daniel S. Katz (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign), Stephanie Lieggi (University of California Santa Cruz), Erin McKiernan (ORFG), Beth Plale (Indiana University, Research Data Alliance - US), Greg Tananbaum (ORFG).
Spotlight Series Recap: Incentivizing Open in Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure, and Hiring
On March 22, 2023 the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) convened academic leaders to discuss incentivizing open scholarship practices in hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT).
Erin McKiernan, ORFG’s community manager, is also a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She moderated the session and started by sharing how close this topic is to her personally and professionally. Over the last few years she has worked with the ScholComm Lab, analyzing promotion and tenure guidelines at over a 100 institutions across the US. She also recently went through the promotion and tenure process herself. Despite the positive outcome, the process highlighted key challenges within current assessment frameworks and inconsistencies in what institutions value in their reward structures.
Read more about the ScholComm Lab’s RPT project on their blog.
McKiernan framed the day’s conversation: “when we are talking about incentives within promotion, tenure, and hiring, what we're really talking about is what universities value, what they recognize, and whether they are the same things.” In McKiernan’s research, she and her co-authors have discovered that what gets rewarded in these policies is not what universities always state they value. University mission statements often talk about the importance of community and public engagement for the betterment of society. Open scholarship practices like making our work openly available by sharing data, code, notebooks, and all kinds of outputs allow individuals to engage with the work, collaborate, and build on the work. There are many public aspects of what faculty do in their day-to-day work, including openly disseminating scholarly outputs, but tenure and promotion guidelines at many universities do not adequately reward public engagement and outreach that open scholarship practices enable.
Specifically, in analyzing tenure and promotion policies, the word “public” is mostly mentioned in the “service” category, which is a traditionally undervalued area, and one that often falls largely to women and minorities and other underrepresented groups at our institutions. When analyzing words like “impact” and “metrics,” traditional outputs like journal articles appeared as valued in a large percentage of documents. Open access came up in a very small percentage of documents, and often with negative connotations. There are clear opportunities for institutions to reform and improve these processes so that they incentivize these public aspects of faculty work.
McKiernan then introduced the panelists: Thad Potter, a 6th year PhD Candidate and the president of the National Association of Graduate- Professional Students; Sara Weston, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon; and Alzada Tipton, Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Whitman College and co-lead for HELIOS Open’s Institutional and Departmental Policy Working Group. The following is a summary of the question and answer session.
How are you currently involved in RPT and hiring reform or advocacy?
Thad Potter: I'd love to see mentoring and student development included in our efforts to reform RPT. We recently partnered with the American Medical Student Association earlier this year, and wrote a piece called “Time to Reform Academic Publishing” in Issues in Science and Technology. In the article, we reflected on the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” and its relevance to early career researchers. Our current incentives within institutions do not align with goals of open scholarship and public access like equity. Change will be necessary to help support a more equitable system, and, for early-career researchers, these topics are increasingly important.
Sara Weston: My work is broadly at the intersection of individual differences in psychology and health. When I was hired I was hired under a job advertisement that specifically called for scholars who engaged in open science. When I arrived, I realized that even though I and a couple of colleagues had been hired with open science backgrounds, those values weren't reflected in our department’s tenure and promotion guidelines. I joined a two-person task force to revise our guidelines, and in doing so, met with many colleagues about what should be valued in tenure. We also explored how our values as a department could be better integrated into our policies, and developed a series of recommendations for changing our department guidelines. These recommendations have gone through a couple rounds of revisions, and now sit with our provost. Unfortunately, the momentum has slowed as we wait, and I’m happy to talk about why I think that's happened, and some of the things that we could do to push it through.
I would also like to second the importance of mentoring, which is an important part of public engagement as well. It prepares students to practice publicly engaged scholarship. We also need to make sure that when we’re doing this work, we're not leaving people behind or making it more difficult for people to engage in open and public scholarship.
Alzada Tipton: I'm an unusual person to be included on this panel because I'm not a scientist, but, when Whitman College was invited to become part of HELIOS Open, I was happy to step forward to co-lead the Institutional and Departmental Policy working group. It’s been a really interesting and terrific experience for me.
As the chief academic officer, I’ve witnessed a lot of faculty go through the RPT process. Before I arrived at Whitman, the institution had gone through a process to try to understand how to recognize diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism in RPT guidelines.
Whitman also received two Mellon grants for community engaged learning, with the goal to understand how to better recognize community engaged learning in RPT. The great thing about being a small Liberal Arts college in a small community is that there truly is this desire to share scholarship not only with the colleagues down the hallway, but also with the larger community.
The HELIOS Open working group I co-lead drafted a Joint Statement on Reforming Hiring, Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion. The statement asks institutions to commit to engaging in a dialogue on developing and advancing hiring and RPT reform strategies that reflect the importance of open research and scholarship in shaping a positive research culture and achieving institutional missions. My president, who is a physicist, and the tenure and promotion committee signed on to the statement agreeing to revisit our RPT guidelines.
How can researchers at different stages (graduate students, professors at different stages, administration) push forward RPT and hiring reform?
Potter: I think there are inherent challenges for graduate students engaging in incentive structures or reform because we are in a strange spot on the student-to-employee spectrum. Graduate students’ roles change over the course of our time at the institution, and we are a very diverse group. I started my Ph. D. program by taking classes as I did as an undergraduate student, but, by the end of the program, my day to day life looks nothing like an undergraduate student’s, and the goal of a Ph. D. program is to elevate us to be peers to our instructors.
Defining incentives for students can be challenging because the career path out of graduate school is often varied. Many might go into the academies, which have a very different set of activities for students to undertake before they graduate than those who might go into industry, public policy, or other careers. Building an incentive structure around these different paths is difficult. I’m a big fan of developing an individual development plan, recognizing it's hard to mandate specific actions for the varied graduate student goals.
Our current system often incentivizes publishing in specific journals, but this is a challenge for many early career researchers who may not be able to pay high article processing charges (APC) some of the publishers levy to make scholarship open. Going from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish,’ doesn't seem ideal.
Weston: Starting at my institution with open science in the job description, I wish I had asked more about how the department is currently or planning to support open science. One thing I didn't recognize when I was interviewing as a postdoc is that there are opportunities to negotiate and bargain, and we should teach that to graduate students. You can ask for policy change.
When working on RPT materials at the University of Oregon, we were trying to address open science in a very broad way: through open access publishing, through recognizing forms of transparency, and through valuing community engagement and community-based participatory science. We ended up focusing solely on guidelines that increased transparency. I think we found ourselves fighting against the “bean counting” mentality that often happens in RPT: how many citations do you have? What's your h-index? How many of these journals did you publish in? Instead, we tried to advocate for painting a fuller picture of what a researcher’s science is like, what their science philosophy includes, how they approached research in general, and how they demonstrate their values through their work.
The changes meant more work for people applying for tenure, including more statements or annotated CVs. As a junior faculty member, I think it was important to say I'm willing to do more work in order to be assessed on more than my number of papers.
When we brought the recommendations to the department, we discovered this conversation is not solely about tenure; it’s tenure, promotion, and merit, which affects everyone in the department. Faculty members who are extremely prolific, including very senior researchers who have many collaborators and students, were concerned about undertaking more work to annotate every publication that goes on their CV. Many also questioned how external reviewers will handle any changes to the process because we don't have control over whether or not external reviewers will value bean counting or honor our new approaches. I found that point of contention very frustrating because we do have a choice as to whether we use letters from external reviewers. We could choose to say “this person didn't read our guidelines or didn't evaluate the candidate based on the things that we value.”
I think this is why HELIOS Open is really important. If many institutions sign on and signal they value transparency and openness, and then agree to teach our faculty how to review other people through that lens, it gives that credibility back to departments. It helps to move us along together and trust that reviewers from other institutions will value the same activities.
Tipton: Before I get into the question you asked, I want to underline something that Sara said about being able to ask for guidelines or policies upon hire. That's a really important point, and I want people to know that is exactly the right moment to do it; that's the time when a hiring person is looking for something that can bring the person to the institution, complete the search, and ensure it’s successful. At Whitman, we have memorandums of understanding with faculty who bring something different to the appointment.
From an administrator’s point of view and from my experience at small liberal arts colleges, it can already be quite difficult to jam our work into three traditional buckets: research, teaching, and service. It’s an asset that much of our work happens across the three areas. However, it becomes difficult to truly recognize this asset in the moment of tenure and promotion to associate professor, where the buckets often become much more distinct. We must develop a more generous way of recognizing work across the three areas.
While we are a bit more free of the bean counting we see at other institutions, we do value peer review. However, we operate in the current system with a volunteer community managed by closed access journals, and our tenure case reviewers are also volunteers. We must take a step back and consider that many of our RPT guidelines were written 20 to 30 years ago and our system relies heavily on volunteer labor under this less than ideal system. We need to think about how we work through the bottlenecks of closed access journals and, instead, work together with the many others focused on moving knowledge forward to support the scholarship of our colleagues without resting on closed structures just because it’s what we are used to.
How do we capitalize on our shared interest to effect change considering we have allies in the federal government, within student groups, and among higher education leaders?
Potter: It’s hard to directly engage with the faculty assessment process. Oftentimes, students aren't in the room when assessment and incentives are discussed, and we’re rarely part of that decision making process. I try to be involved in as much as I can, but it's hard to kind of do that on a local and national level. I try to make connections to junior faculty because they are the closest removed from my status as a student, and will one day be running the departments. It can be difficult to get tenured professors to do new things that they’re not already required or incentivized to do. However, it’s important to participate and take a step back and look at the broader picture to make better systems.
Weston: All professors have to engage in service, and while we generally try to protect junior faculty from doing too much at first, there are always opportunities to be engaged in something and to bring a concern at faculty meetings. Consider speaking up while honoring the bandwidth you have to take on service.
It’s also important to bring our colleagues who are a little bit less engaged into the conversation. Consider talking about open scholarship with your graduate mentor or other faculty members. Maybe if we had more people than just me asking about this, there would be quicker movement and more support for collective action.
Tipton: An interesting dynamic I’m seeing is that, for the more faculty oriented people in the virtual HELIOS Open working group meetings, some are pointing to the provost as an obstacle to RPT reform. As the provost, I’ve always said “well, it’s about the faculty.” I do believe that the faculty need to be the leaders in pushing for reform, while recognizing that many people dislike change or are extremely busy to the point where asking them to take on anything can feel quite burdensome. I can work with the faculty on the guidelines and recommendations they come up with and be supportive of their efforts.
I also want to reflect on Sara’s remarks and my thoughts about pre-tenured faculty who feel like they can't speak up about things, and to post-tenure faculty who feel like it’s no longer their problem to reform RPT. We need faculty to be willing to be leaders in this important issue. Sara’s voice, for example, is so important.
A way to push reform forward with colleagues may include talking about what open scholarship enables as part of others’ priorities for reforming RPT guidelines. For example, diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism is crucial to my faculty, and we can advance these efforts by opening up scholarship. Similarly, outside of the sciences, many faculty value public facing humanities work at Whitman. It has expanded our definition of “scholarship,” and provides us an opportunity to ask our faculty how we can give full credit for this work that they are so passionate about, and where they feel like they are making such a difference.
When we think about the college's mission, this is another entry into the reform conversation. Our mission statements often reflect the hope that we make a difference in the world, so why would we not reward activities that enable mission fulfillment. These are activities that would make a provost’s heart very happy.
McKiernan concluded the session by sharing the need to flip the narrative that reforming RPT in support of open scholarship’s goals is onerous, or an action that forces our faculty via unfunded mandates related to grant compliance. Instead, we want researchers to be credited for enabling our missions, for activities that go beyond bean counting, and for activities that are often relegated to the service bucket or other lower assessment categories.
HELIOS Open Collaborates on US Federal Government’s Year of Open Science
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) is pleased to collaborate with NASA and other federal agencies in celebration of 2023 as the Federal Year of Open Science. Today, the White House launched this multi-agency initiative across the federal government to spark change and inspire open science engagement through events and activities that will advance adoption of open science. HELIOS Open will serve as a cross-sector collaborator, engaging across its 88 members to co-develop, promote, and advance a range of open science initiatives.
"We are excited to collaborate with federal agencies to make open science easier and more rewarding for both individuals and the organizations that support them," said Dr. Geeta Swamy, Duke University Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity and Strategic Lead for HELIOS Open. "HELIOS Open member institutions are eager to develop actionable policies, resources, guidance, metrics, and infrastructure to advance open science scholarship. Cross-sector coordination through initiatives such as the Year of Open Science are critical to harmonizing and scaling these efforts."
"The Year of Open Science is a great step forward in promoting productive ways for researchers and scholars to communicate their work more openly and inclusively for the benefit of both science and society," said Dr. Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University and Co-Chair of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open). "HELIOS Open is excited to team with NASA to advance this important initiative."
Through its collaboration with NASA and other participating agencies on the 2023 Year of Open Science, HELIOS Open will serve as a critical conduit between higher education and the federal government on a range of open science activities, including:
Convening meetings on HELIOS Open campuses to discuss practical considerations like infrastructure and open scholarship good practices
Highlighting projects at HELIOS Open member institutions that advance the Year of Open Science agenda
Collaborating with federal agencies and allies from adjacent sectors (e.g., philanthropies, professional societies) to develop resources, tools, and incentives language to make the practice of open scholarship easier and more rewarding
Serving as a test bed for rapid, iterative, and transparent open scholarship experiments
Acting as a conduit to help optimize and implement agency open science plans across the 88 HELIOS Open member institutions
Awarding flash grants to stimulate and reward open activities at minority serving institutions.
Read more about the 2023 Year of Open Science in Nature and check out the new federal website to keep apprised of the latest agency developments.
Spotlight Series Recap: Open Source, Tech Transfer & Commercialization
On November 15th, 2022, the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) convened academic leaders to discuss their open source, code, and software sharing efforts. This blog post summarizes key themes from the session.
The session was moderated by Drew Endy, Martin Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, where he is also faculty co-director of degree programs at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka Stanford’s d.school). He’s also served as a member of NASEM’s Standing Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. As a bioengineer working in synthetic biology, Dr. Endy and his teams have made many contributions to open biotechnology, especially with material transfer agreements (MTA), which are typically bilateral contracts that govern the sharing of physical samples used in life science research. Most MTAs in biotech and academia prohibit redistribution of received materials and also sharing with commercial partners. While often appropriate, these restrictions can hinder translation of materials that could otherwise be freely shared.
Thus, Drew’s team created the OpenMTA as an option to conventional MTAs. The OpenMTA purposefully allows both redistribution of received materials and distribution to commercial partners. About 100 institutions already support the OpenMTA so that students and researchers have the option of more readily sharing materials in support of innovation and translation, which are shared goals of our collective HELIOS Open work.
The next contributor was Alexander Amini, Postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Dr. Amini described creating and open sourcing VISTA to the public. He and his team are working on and have open sourced a data-driven simulator, built and rendered using raw data from the real world. Their vision for VISTA is that it serves as a step toward building a more sustainable and resilient mobility path for the future of transportation.
With autonomous vehicles and robotics, realizing a society with embedded autonomous vehicles can be difficult. You can train your systems in the real world, but doing so is both time intensive and dangerous. Simulation presents opportunities to train in a much safer, controlled environment. Yet, reality gaps exist even today's best simulators, discouraging direct transfer into the real world. The VISTA approach leverages real data sets to build and scalably engineer synthetic simulated worlds.
Developing this fully data-driven approach presents a very interesting problem for open source, Amini described, because you're not just open sourcing software; you are also open sourcing the data that drives that software. VISTA can harness the power of the data available to synthesize these highly realistic, high fidelity, and scalable data sets, including data on cases that are normally too expensive and dangerous to collect when testing in the real world.
In the autonomous vehicle community, autonomous vehicle companies, and those that are considered leading pioneers, are building up closed source simulation engines. Without unifying across these engines, and without a unified testing framework for different pipelines, it is difficult for the government to regulate and evaluate what it means to have a good autonomous solution that can be deployed into society. By open sourcing the code, Amini and team are enabling safe and data-driven environments, allowing creators to unify around good governance of artificial intelligence policies.
Since open sourcing VISTA a few months ago, it has amassed over 7,000 independent installations with about a 100 new installations of the simulation engine every week. The team is excited about VISTA’s unique ability to create immersive virtual worlds.
Following Dr. Amini was Julieta Arancio, Postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society and at the University of Bath
Open hardware is the practice of licensing the designs of a physical object in a way that allows the object to be studied, modified, created, and distributed by anyone.
Dr. Arancio began by reflecting on an academic culture where commercialization is embedded into research training early and by design. When researchers develop a new design that includes a hardware component, they work with Technology Transfer Offices (TTO), and the TTO decides if the invention is patentable or not. It is a huge investment for colleges and universities, and the process has several challenges, including a lack of transparency and other considerations:
Journals often do not include ancillary or contextual information about hardware designs, which is needed for reproducibility.
The current academic culture can encourage secrecy, which slows down innovation, and rewards commercialization over sharing and collaboration. Some key designs are protected, precluding creation on top of the original design.
Choosing not to patent some inventions leads to missed opportunities for greater impact.
In advocating for open hardware, Arancio encouraged researchers to think beyond, “is my invention patentable or non patentable?” and look to opportunities. Consider openly licensing hardware designs with TTOs as partners. Good open hardware design is accompanied by documentation, including design files, the source code, and other layers of instruction. This lowers the barrier for collaboration and allows new communities to emerge. Open hardware also encourages reproducibility and innovation.
In the last 5 years we have seen open science hardware business models emerge. Arancio provided three examples of open hardware businesses. These organizations operate by protecting trademarks and selling specific components (kits, devices, and other physical objects), design services, and technical support expertise.
Open Ephys, a company building open source tools for neuroscience. Hardware researchers are tinkering all the time with their tools, adapting them to new research questions. Open Ephys is showcasing and making accessible incredible designs that they think deserve more recognition. They also advocate for open standards. They provide technical support, training, and warranty.
OpenTrons, a company that produces robots for experimentation. You can add modules to your robot as needed. OpenTrons offers a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce results. They are also advocate for open protocols that increase reducibility.
OpenFlexure Microscope, a company that offers a design for a fully 3D printed, customizable, open-source optical microscope. The microscope includes excellent documentation online and has a robust community supporting it. Users include community scientists in Argentina, medical doctors in the US, and malaria researchers in Tanzania.
Arancio asserted the importance of shifting the way we train and support researchers. We must show students that there is more to innovation than patenting, and that you can grow professionally if you do open work.
She closed with several thought-provoking questions:
Could we ask researchers to share designs through institutional repositories, could we ask funders to mandate open hardware, and can TTOs adopt open licensing practices? There are procurement strategies that can change to promote open hardware. Better science enables more research questions and the ability to access and modify existing tools to create new knowledge.
Our final speaker was Sayeed Choudhury, Director of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Choudhury spoke about Open Source Program Offices (OSPO), their relationship to TTOs, and opportunities for collaboration for impact. At a college or university, researchers work with TTOs to commercialize and grow impact. Choudhury argued that OSPOs can serve a major role, and asserted that software is the most important output to share to enable reproducibility.
Choudhury provided background on three new federal memos that include code and software sharing components:
The Department of Defense (DoD) has a long history of working with open source software. DoD affirms, from both the consumption and production perspective of software, that we need to be open by default. This kind of design principle was an important underpinning for the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, with DoD involved in both.
The recent White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo focuses on procurement issues for open source software. It includes a statement about “vendors” needing to attest that they are complying with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework for secure software. It is unclear who or what constitutes a “vendor” or how such attestations would be made for open source software.
The Nelson Memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) builds upon the 2013 memo, and requires all federally funded research articles be open immediately upon publication in an agency-designated repository. The memo does not directly mention software, but does open up the option to share other research outputs like code and software. It represents public access interest shifting from articles to data. Software is arguably next in terms of attention and policy.
He believes we have a collective opportunity to influence the federal government, including the OSTP, as they move forward in their thinking about open source software. OSPO++, funded by the Sloan Foundation, is a network formed around university-based OSPOs and some government-based open source offices. He believes forming a network of universities to explore collective conversations around open source is a good approach to influencing and encouraging software sharing policies.
Choudhury put forward the following takeaways he learned from his own experience and conversations with the federal government:
We should be proactive, not reactive, in encouraging OSTP to develop software sharing policies. We need to work across sectors and among institutions in partnership to inform the next instantiation around open source software, particularly as it relates to lessons learned from responses for public access to articles and data.
Consider OSPOs as organizational APIs that can help design and support the OSTP’s consideration of public access to open source software, including agency designated repositories. We, as institutions, must position ourselves in this context and recognize that by doing so, and considering the private and corporate repositories that already exist, there are opportunities and also threats.
We must figure out the intellectual property issues around open software. We can learn from the private sector and organizations like the Open Source Initiative. Reflecting on institutions and their handling of data and data sharing requirements, he sees institutions trying to figure out how to open their data and believes we can do better, particularly as it relates to coordinated responses across universities.
Finally, Choudhury reflected on the balance between and among academic freedom, reproducibility, open scholarship, risk management, and technology transfer. We need to understand that university administration, TTOs, research projects administrators, and others think about risks in sharing research outputs. Choudhury envisions an institutional Venn diagram where one looks at risk alongside open scholarship benefits and academic freedom to find a sweet spot for action. Different institutions might have specific contexts or requirements (e.g., public or private university), but as a community, we can come together and work proactively to inform the OSTP, e.g., about how we wish to share software.
Choudhury also noted the difference between technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and innovation. Technology transfer typically involves commercialization that benefits an individual university. Knowledge transfer refers to translation or dissemination of open scholarship without commercialization, typically associated with the social sciences and humanities. Innovation refers to translation or dissemination that features new forms of social impact and partnerships (e.g., community centers) and national or global impact (e.g., university outputs licensed to help the US government rebuild manufacturing capacity).
Choudhury concluded with two invitations: 1) an invitation to join an OSPO++ webinar to learn more about institutional OSPOs, and 2) an invitation to join a working group focused on the big questions around open source software and knowledge transfer.
Please contact Caitlin@orfg.org for more information on both invitations, as well as any other questions or thoughts you may have related to open source and commercialization.
Spotlight Series Recap: Data Stewardship and Data Sharing
On August 23rd, 2022, HELIOS Open convened higher education leaders to discuss their data stewardship policy efforts with members. Geeta Swamy, Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at the Duke University School of Medicine, Associate Vice President for Research, and HELIOS Open Strategic Lead moderated the session.
Sarah Nusser, Professor Emerita of Statistics and former Vice President for Research at Iowa State University (ISU)
Nusser described her role in establishing Iowa State's Data Sharing Task Force and as a collaborator with the AAU-APLU Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (APARD) initiative. When reflecting on APARD, Nusser described the importance of the the Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data in articulating a vision for implementing a data sharing policy and in providing recommended steps, processes, and case studies that help campuses understand different implementation options.
At ISU, Nusser knew she needed to engage her campus colleagues and offices that support research advancement, compliance, and data sharing services when beginning to develop their institutional data sharing policy. With ISU’s library dean and the chief information officer (CIO) on board, they established a task force to discover and represent not only the faculty researcher perspective, but also the various entities that are involved in data sharing efforts. The data sharing task force piloted initial components of the system, including a draft research data policy that was released as guidelines to researchers, a cross-office data submission process that connected compliance reviews with data sharing support for researchers, and a prototype data repository that enabled researchers to share their data after review (DataShare).
Nusser concluded by describing challenges the task force faced with establishing their system before the APARD Guide was published. While campus leaders were supportive of this effort, data transparency was not included as a priority on their campus messaging to faculty, as is now recommended by the Guide. The task force was also established without explicit resources, which meant that task force members could not devote the kind of time needed to move quickly. Nusser also noted that the task force did not do a formal inventory of campus resources and discovered potential partners in other campus units late in their process that might have been helpful to the project.
In her concluding remarks, she reflected, “You can make policies, you can set up infrastructure, you can implement trainings and workflows, but sometimes the biggest barrier is navigating campus culture.” As researchers are embracing open science practices, it's becoming clearer what kind of planning and tool sets are useful to assist this adoption. Nusser recommended ensuring support for data sharing is present at the front end of a research project. Nusser also advocated for rethinking our reward system to value research transparency, including sharing data, code, and methodology. The National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship and HELIOS Open are big steps forward in this.
Nick Wigginton, Assistant Vice President for Research at University of Michigan
Just as the University of Michigan began assessing how to implement recommendations from a committee on public access to research data, three events slowed their work: 1) the COVID-19 pandemic began, shifting everyone’s attention to ensuring research continuity across the university, 2) the NIH announced they would soon be releasing a new data sharing policy, and 2) both the vice provost and provost, who initially charged the committee to work on a data sharing policy, transitioned from the institution, leaving the committee with little bandwidth to continue.
Wigginton indicated the APARD guidelines and the NIH requirements re-energized their policy work in 2021, and the committee began focusing on developing and implementing concrete steps to launch the U-M Research Data Stewardship Initiative. At the initiative's launch, they provided a website with guides, best practices, and frequently asked questions. While the NIH policy is a specific need to address in certain fields, they intentionally sought to be inclusive of all disciplines given broader expectations around data stewardship across other agencies.
The Research Data Stewardship Initiative, Wigginton described, established a multi-pronged approach to coalition building and education involving various campus units. Given the broad range of units that touch various elements of research data across a large research institution, the effort closely engages with the data service and research compliance communities, the CIO and General Counsel’s offices, the library, and schools and colleges. With this work, the committee encountered challenges inherent in coordinating across such a large institution: “There are probably hundreds of people across our institutions that think about data management every day; some work in service units to support faculty, some run disciplinary repositories, and some are faculty that are leading their disciplines and advising trainees.” Campus efforts like the Research Data Stewardship Initiative are focused on learning from one another and ensuring researchers are following the value and best practices around data that can improve the transparency, rigor, and impact of research.
In the future, the Initiative will host a series of webinars with leading edge researchers who have designed data or code sharing platforms or who study various aspects of data governance and sharing. This effort will support faculty-to-faculty learning about new and changing research practices, all with the goal of demonstrating the value of research data stewardship as the research landscape shifts.
HELIOS Open Analysis of New OSTP Guidance
On August 25, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research that significantly alters the open scholarship landscape.
The new policy guidance advances previous federal policy in a number of impactful ways:
Immediate access: The new guidance removes the previous 12-month embargo period on article sharing, and directs federal agencies to develop policies that would require access to publications “without any embargo or delay”. As the guidance affirms, such timely sharing is key to enabling the goals of open access, including accelerated scientific discovery. Importantly, the guidance would not require authors to publish in fully open access journals that may incur costs, but instead encourages sharing through “agency-designated repositories”.
Data sharing: The guidance directs federal agencies to update their policies on data sharing to enable immediate access to the data underlying published studies. In addition, it encourages agencies to think more expansively and “develop approaches and timelines” for the sharing of data not associated with publications. These are crucial steps for improving the verifiability, integrity, and reproducibility of federally funded research.
Broader focus: The definition of ‘publications’ is expanded to potentially cover not just journal articles, but also peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings. This represents an important recognition of the diversity of research outputs, especially across different disciplines, and could help incentivize broader scholarly communication.
Equity language: Centering equity as a guiding principle will encourage agencies to think about ways they can increase access to research without unintentionally raising additional barriers. Specifically, the guidance asks agencies to include in their plans, “How to maximize equitable reach of public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications” and to further “consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.”
Research reusability: The guidance emphasizes the need for publications to be shared in both machine-readable formats and under terms that allow for “use and re-use rights”. The guidance also asks agencies to develop strategies to make “data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable” (i.e., FAIR). This would permit researchers, citizen scientists, or industries to build on these shared outputs, as well as take advantage of emerging technologies, like content mining and artificial intelligence, to generate new knowledge.
Metadata and PIDs: The guidance calls for agencies to share publication metadata, including funding information, and to require the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Timeliness: The guidance outlines a promising timeline that both requires agencies to update their policy plans relatively quickly but also gives them ample time to roll out the changes. Larger agencies are asked to update their policy plans within six months, publish the plans by the end of 2024, and then enact the new policy within one year (by end of 2025). Smaller agencies not subject to the 2013 memo will have a year to devise their initial plans.This timeline highlights the growing need to increase access to research sooner rather than later, especially in response to emerging global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
Comprehensive coverage: Whereas the previous policy applied only to federal agencies with $100M+ in R&D expenditures, the new guidance applies to all U.S. federal agencies and departments – a jump from 20 to over 400 federal bodies. This will dramatically increase policy reach, and eventually the volume of research openly accessible and reusable.
This is a win for open scholarship and a validation of our “mutually reinforcing vectors” theory of change. We are encouraged that the language from the White House echoes the spirit of our own co-chair’s remarks from HELIOS Open’s kickoff event: “To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research.” HELIOS Open has a tremendous opportunity to provide support, guidance, and incentives to help our researchers comply with this emerging policy. We look forward to exploring this work together with you. Stay tuned for more.
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