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.
Resources:
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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