June HELIOS Open Newsletter
A Note from our Strategic Lead
Dear Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship Members,
Open scholarship enables research transparency and integrity, facilitates scientific discovery, and promotes public health. It can also be a key driver in building public trust, agency, and engagement in the work we do as scholars, researchers, and scientists.
At Duke University, we have several initiatives advancing open scholarship practices and rewards at the institutional and departmental levels. These include open scholarship promotion and tenure guidelines in the Clinical Sciences; our Research Data Initiative, ensuring data integrity and fostering a culture of data sharing; and our Research Quality Management Program, a collaborative effort to implement best practices in research integrity and accountability
There is undoubtedly a great deal of open scholarship activity across the 78 (and growing) heterogeneous institutions that are HELIOS Open members. Some of it is strategic, organized by leadership to consciously improve research workflows and communication. Some of it is grassroots, driven by the 2.5 million faculty, staff, and students learning and working at these schools. What excites me most about HELIOS Open is the opportunity to learn from one another, to develop best practices and shared resources, and to bring more colleges and universities into this collaboration. By working together, we can effect a paradigm shift that advances open scholarship policies and practices. Together, we have the tremendous opportunity to develop and promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
— Geeta Swamy, Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at Duke University
HELIOS Open Launches with Focus on Collective Action
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On March 31, 2022, presidents and high-level presidential representatives from 65 colleges and universities participated in the first convening of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open)…
HELIOS Open Working Groups
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Open Scholarship Good Practices:
This working group will (1) curate current good practices resources that institutions can adapt and adopt, and (2) scope an on-demand open scholarship support service/National Open Office Hours service. Simultaneously, the working group will begin to curate curricula for training the next generation of researchers to engage in good open scholarship practices by design.
Cross-Sector Alignment:
This working group will develop a set of “offers” – what HELIOS Open members, and the higher education community more generally, can bring to the cross-sector conversation with research funders, government agencies, societies, and industry to catalyze open scholarship. The group will also develop “asks” – what is needed from other groups to optimize and scale these efforts.
Shared Open Scholarship Infrastructure:
This working group will develop a “Guide for Research Infrastructure Decision-Making," which includes a concise set of questions and considerations to help campuses make informed choices about when to develop new infrastructure, adapt or adopt existing resources, and more. This guide could also be leveraged when applying for research funding.
Institutional & Departmental Policy Language:
This working group will develop language supporting open scholarship practices in hiring, annual reviews, and Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT). Participants will develop a roadmap that institutions can follow to socialize and adopt open scholarship-specific changes to RPT. A Commitment→Action→Accountability Framework will guide this work.
Open Scholarship in Focus
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HELIOS Open in the News:
New Initiative Incentivizes Open Research - The Scientist
Top-tier US universities push for open science - Times Higher Education
College and University Leaders Join Forces to Advance Open Science - Library Journal Info Docket
U.S academic leaders join forces for open scholarship - Research Information
Open Scholarship Events:
Open Work in Academia Summit - presented by Open@RIT and sponsored, in part, by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Ways to Engage
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Need HELIOS Open materials for an upcoming briefing or presentation? Have ideas for programming you’d like to suggest? Interested in joining another working group or connecting with another HELIOS Open institution? Contact Caitlin@orfg.org for help.
“HELIOS Open Newsletter” by the Open Research Funders Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines
The University of Maryland is rewarding faculty members in the department of psychology who perform and disseminate research in accordance with open science practices. In April, the department adopted new guidelines that explicitly codify open science as a core criteria in tenure and promotion review.
The change was several years in the making and championed by Michael Dougherty, chair of the department. “When you think about the goal and purpose of higher education and why we take these positions, it’s because we felt there would be some good that we could impart on the world,” Dougherty said. “The traditional markers of impact are how many times you’ve been cited [in a journal]. That’s not the type of impact that is valuable to the broader society.”
The new policy was necessary, he said, so incentives for advancement reflect the values of scientists and their institutions.
“The land grant institution is really founded on giving back to the community what the community is investing in,” he said. “Making our work as accessible as possible, with as few barriers as possible, has to be a cornerstone component. You can’t conceive impact without access.”
Throughout his career, Dougherty has advocated for leveraging open practices to enhance scientific integrity. He uses the Open Science Framework for documenting and sharing data, and requires his students to use this platform as well. Once named department chair five years ago, Dougherty said he was committed to rewarding work that was made broadly available without barriers, but he recognized it would be a culture change that required time. He started by sharing information with his colleagues and talking about the main issues of transitioning to open science over two to three years.
On the College Park campus, Dougherty assembled a small working group of faculty members (an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor) to join him in rewriting the review guidelines. The last time they were touched was 2006, so revisions were overdue, he said. Informed by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and other resources, they started fresh — tossing out old criteria and redrafting the policy.
Dougherty co-authored an article in 2019 that underscored the importance of making research evaluation more transparent and in service to the public good. Soon after the piece was published, he connected with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science where he met like-minded scholars pushing for changes in the incentive structure.
“It gave me some hope,” Dougherty said of the group. “When the Roundtable was launched, we talked about accelerating change. The National Academies brings with it some cachet. If we can leverage that cachet to really do something that's going to institute change, we have a shot.”
Engaging with the Roundtable and, more recently, the Roundtable’s spin-off Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) was a chance to push for systemic change, Dougherty said. While there is often talk about a desire to transform the tenure and promotion process, it’s difficult for individual institutions to do alone. Since advancement has traditionally been tied to prestige of journal publication, ushering in a new approach involved many scholars acting together, he said.
It’s difficult for an institution to make a policy change when there is uncertainty whether peers, colleagues and funders outside the institution share the same values. “The institution is still too small of a unit for the changes to be able to cascade into everyone’s behavior,” said Juan Pablo Alperin, associate professor in the publishing program at Simon Fraser University in Canada who has studied the issue.
Between 2017 and 2022, Alperin and the Open Research Funders Group’s Eric McKiernan were among the scholars who conducted a multi-year research project analyzing more than 850 review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) guidelines and 338 surveys, with scholars from 129 research institutions across Canada and the United States. They found that academics perceive others to care more about prestige than they do themselves, suggesting an appetite for a shift in evaluation criteria—if a transformation could be coordinated.
Alperin said the new guidelines at UMD and elsewhere are encouraging and create momentum.
“We learned from our research that these guidelines create a signal–asserting values by departments and institutions that can be effective,” said Alperin. “As more institutions make this explicit in their guidelines, that starts to create the conversations needed for a widespread desire for change.”
The UMD department of psychology document begins with a statement of overarching principles that lay the groundwork for what the new approach was trying to accomplish.
The evaluative criteria includes a commitment to providing equitable access to scholarly articles through open access publications and preprint servers (in accordance with UMD’s Equitable Access policy). The department now places a premium on team science and embraces diverse approaches to scholarship. It acknowledges the difficulty doing work with hard-to-reach populations and the importance of community engaged work and open science. The guidelines also draw explicitly from the Roundtable’s Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices in the evaluative criteria used in merit review.
There were multiple faculty meetings that included group editing of the guidelines before they were adopted in the spring of 2022.
“The level of faculty engagement was really healthy,” Dougherty said. “By the time we were finalizing it, people had bought into it. They knew what the right thing to do was. It was not a hard sell.”
For other institutions considering adopting new evaluation guidelines, Dougherty suggests the key is reframing impact as accessibility. The new approach is a way to empower people to do the research they want to do, he said, and translates into scholars feeling their work is meaningful.
Geeta Swamy, Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at Duke University and HELIOS Open strategic lead, praised the UMD psychology department’s approach as a model that other institutions can replicate. “A core part of the HELIOS Open collaboration is identifying real-world solutions that can effectively move the needle toward open scholarship, then working to tailor and scale them across scores of institutions. Our Institutional & Departmental Policy Language Working Group is keen to leverage and amplify Maryland’s work.”
Adds Dougherty: “When I think about what it is that we need to do as scientists to really solve the world's problems, it's all hands on deck. And in order for that to happen, we have to be able to make our research products, not just the articles, but the data, the analysis, code, everything available.”
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Posted in collaboration with SPARC
HELIOS Open Launches with Focus on Collective Action
On March 31, 2022, presidents and high-level presidential representatives from 65 colleges and universities participated in the first convening of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open). HELIOS Open emerges from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. Current members collectively represent 1.8 million students, faculty, and staff. The key outcome of the meeting was a clear commitment to collective action to advance open scholarship.
In their opening remarks, each HELIOS Open co-chair emphasized the importance of coordinated, scalable activities in support of open scholarship. Speaking of HELIOS Open’s potential, Arizona State University President Michael Crow described facilitating “movement toward modern scholarship-based science that is [as] wildly open as it was in pre-scholarship modality, with more cultural awareness, cultural engagement, and intergenerational communication and understanding across various elements of our broadly scoped societies.”
Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels emphasized the role higher education plays in advancing open values: “Colleges and universities are one of the most vital fact generating and fact checking institutions within democratic society. One of their core obligations is to share facts with the public and inform the creation of sound policy, and to check the claims of those who are in power. The more that we can share facts and ideas beyond our walls, the more we can prove our worth to the democratic project and improve the lives of those who stand to benefit the most from the work that we're doing.”
In her remarks, Benedict College President Roslyn Artis stressed the importance of open scholarship as the head of an historically black liberal arts college: “Institutions large and small, with a diversity of ideas, research capacity, and acumen, have something to contribute — within disciplines; across disciplines; and in research teams across institutions, states and regions—to create collaborative solutions to complex problems. The ability to collaborate more effectively, across institutions, is stimulated by open research.”
Geeta Swamy, HELIOS Open’s Strategic Lead and Duke University Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity, then provided an open scholarship case study in the form of Duke’s Research Data Initiative, which serves as a central hub for campus open data and research activities. “Open science can be key in gaining the public's trust and appropriately stewarding the work that they are entrusting us to do. Making research open allows people to see our work and contributes to the culture of research integrity.”
In pre-meeting survey responses and during meeting breakouts, HELIOS Open participants expressed interest in forming working groups focused on the following key areas:
Drafting guidance for students and faculty to clearly and succinctly articulate good practices for sharing specific forms of open scholarship (e.g., papers, data).
Engaging with other key stakeholders (e.g., government agencies, philanthropies, professional societies, publishers) to align open scholarship policies and incentives.
Collaborating with other institutions on shared resourcing and infrastructure.
Identifying policy language that can be adapted and adopted by departments on our campus, and/or across the entirety of the institution.
HELIOS Open members will convene over the coming months to begin scoping priorities and developing testable recommendations. These efforts will inform the next HELIOS Open member meeting, which will be held in late fall. Where possible, HELIOS Open activities will build upon the wealth of tools, case studies, and other resources that have been developed across member institutions and the broader research ecosystem, developing complementary outputs as appropriate.
During the meeting, Greg Tananbaum Director of the Open Research Funders Group and liaison between HELIOS Open and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, noted that the scope and tenor of HELIOS Open interventions will vary across the membership: “Success will look different for different members. We aren’t all starting at the same place and we won’t all end up in the same place. This is a feature not a bug. The purpose of HELIOS Open is not to lay down lines in the sand. It’s to encourage each member to take steps that are appropriate for their specific community.”
President Daniels added, “I’m excited about the work that lies ahead for this group. It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to exchange ideas, share best practices, and take action together as a coalition of the willing. If we can help move the entire academic research enterprise toward greater openness, we can make our research and our democracy stronger and better. I know this is a big and lofty charge, but I think it's one that's worth pursuing. The stakes are simply too high not to.”
The project is supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Templeton World Charity Foundation. Institutions interested in joining HELIOS Open should contact caitlin@orfg.org for more information.
College and University Leaders Join Forces to Advance Open Scholarship
Bold collaboration to improve research accessibility and inclusivity
March 22, 2022 — In a push to make scholarly outputs more transparent and beneficial to a broader community, leaders from a diverse array of 65 U.S. colleges and universities are joining forces to advance the principles and practices of open scholarship. The partnership will ensure that as many students, faculty, practitioners, policy makers, and community members as possible have access to, and a voice in, research and scholarship.
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship, known as HELIOS Open, is a cohort of colleges and universities formed to create collective action to advance open scholarship across their campuses. HELIOS Open takes place within the larger context of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science.
“HELIOS Open represents the most promising, ambitious attempt to align higher education practices with open scholarship values,” said Greg Tananbaum, secretariat of the National Academies’ Roundtable and Director of Open Research Funders Group, a network of funders committed to the open sharing of research outputs. “Colleges and universities can make it easier and more rewarding for students, faculty, and staff to engage in open scholarship activities like data sharing and self-archiving their papers. HELIOS Open is an important collective step in that direction.”
HELIOS Open members have agreed to commit a high-level presidential representative to work with other institutions to develop actionable incentives, resources, and infrastructure that broadens access to research and scholarship. Leaders will also work with relevant units on their campuses to champion open scholarship policies and programs and to support internal stakeholders in establishing appropriate milestones, communications channels, infrastructure, supports, resources, and accountability mechanisms. HELIOS Open members will meet regularly as a community of practice to identify areas of shared interest and possible collaboration, to discuss success and challenges, and to develop guidance for other institutions.
“We believe HELIOS Open will accelerate the adoption of open scholarship by engaging senior leaders across higher education to collaborate on areas of shared interest such as hiring, training, and tenure practices,” said Geeta Swamy, the Strategic Lead for HELIOS Open and Duke University Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity. “Collective action and ongoing dialog can help identify best practices, as well as areas ripe for institutional cooperation.”
HELIOS Open is co-chaired by Arizona State University President Michael Crow, Benedict College President Roslyn Artis, and Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels. Tananbaum and HELIOS Open Program Manager Caitlin Carter provide operational support. HELIOS Open is generously supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Templeton World Charity Foundation
HELIOS Open members meet in late March to kick off the work. Learn more about HELIOS Open and find a full list of members at heliosopen.org.
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