“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) responded right away, convening members for a virtual briefing by Alondra Nelson, who at the time served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy director for science and society of the White House OSTP, and Christopher Marcum, then-assistant director for open science and data policy at the OSTP. Both contextualized the public access guidance within the Biden Administration’s larger priorities and described how climate change, social inequity, and COVID-19 are compelling, real-world examples of the critical and urgent need for release of data. Additionally, the policy is an important part of upholding and supporting research integrity to protect and restore public trust in scholarship, to help keep track of investments, and maintain accountability through a public record. The Nelson Memorandum offers higher education the opportunity to promote equity and transparency in research through public access compliance. However, colleges and universities are responsible for implementing changes (to infrastructure, policies, training, and more) to comply with new and changing requirements.”
Category Archives: oa.helios
COAPI Community Call: HELIOS Update
“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) is a network of 96 colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship across their campuses. HELIOS currently has four active working groups, each addressing complementary aspects of the open scholarship landscape. Collectively, we are working to make open scholarship easier for individual researchers and the institutions that support them; to align incentive structures like hiring and promotion and tenure to properly reward open activities; to stimulate durable, scalable infrastructure that supports open scholarship; and to coordinate with like-minded activities in the governmental, philanthropic, and professional society sectors to ensure that we are moving in the same direction to promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
Caitlin Carter, HELIOS Program Manager, will join us for her second COAPI Community Call and update us on the work HELIOS has done since July 2022.”
Lightning Round Talks – YouTube
“Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) Briefing”
HELIOS Members Co-Author Research Software Policy Recommendations to Federal Agencies — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“A cohort of HELIOS 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….”
Spotlight Series Recap: Incentivizing Open in Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure, and Hiring — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“On March 22, 2023 the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) convened academic leaders to discuss incentivizing open scholarship practices in hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT)….
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….”
Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Guide: Buy, Build, or Partner A Decision-Making Framework to Support Campus Leaders
“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) created this rubric to assist institutions in making informed decisions when buying, building, or sharing/partnering on scholarly communication infrastructure.”
Spotlight Series — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“Colleges and universities aspire to advance discovery; promote responsible and ethical practices; foster collaboration within and across disciplines; train and nurture future generations of scholars and researchers; promote robust engagement in the research enterprise; nurture trust between science and society; inform the creation of sound public policy; and expand diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility in the research and scholarly endeavors. Open sharing of research and scholarship is a key enabler of these core aspirations.
Join us as we discuss incentivizing open scholarship practices in hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure. In this conversation, we will explore:
Current gaps in explicit incentives and support structures for assessing the contributions of scholarship to the various dimensions of publicness.
Growing efforts among HELIOS schools and/or departments currently working to transform research incentives and promote more inclusive knowledge creation.
Perspectives on rewards and incentives from researchers in different stages of their career….”
University of Maryland works with HELIOS on open scholarship initiatives, with UMD Libraries in the lead. | University Libraries
University of Maryland works with HELIOS on open scholarship initiatives, with UMD Libraries in the lead.
HELIOS Collaborates on US Federal Government’s Year of Open Science — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) 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 will serve as a cross-sector collaborator, engaging across its 88 members to co-develop, promote, and advance a range of open science initiatives….”
Emory University joins HELIOS; Emory Libraries’ Lisa Macklin will serve as representative
“Emory University has joined the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), a collective launched in spring 2022 to advance and promote open research. Associate vice provost and university librarian Lisa Macklin will serve as the Emory representative.
More than 80 colleges and universities that are committed to advancing open research and scholarship have become HELIOS members to date, including Duke, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford and Yale universities and the University of Georgia.
HELIOS includes members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). Higher education leaders affiliated with NASEM came together to create a community of practice to promote a more transparent, inclusive and trustworthy ecosystem of open scholarship.
Emory’s participation in the HELIOS initiative will enhance the ongoing work at Emory around open access and open scholarship and the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Office….”
Demonstrating WashU’s Commitment to Open Research – University Libraries | Washington University in St. Louis
“During Open October, University Libraries and Becker Medical Library shine a spotlight on open research and open scholarship, highlighting its impacts on our campus and promoting the tools that the libraries provide to support it. The hallmarks of open scholarship are inclusivity, transparency, collaboration, and barrier-free dissemination of scholarly outputs (publications, data sets, code, etc.), and thus open access publishing, open science, open source, and open data are all subsets of open scholarship. While WashU is engaged in a variety of initiatives supporting open scholarship, and we encourage you to review other Open October programs to learn about them, one that merits special attention this year is Washington University’s participation in the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS).
Convened by the National Academies in early 2022, HELIOS is a cohort of colleges and universities who have committed to advance open scholarship within their institutions, and WashU has been engaged from the early days. HELIOS now has more than 80 of our peer institutions as members and has established four working groups to create a framework for moving institutions forward in support of open scholarship. These working groups are focusing on:
Institutional & Departmental Policy Language
Developing a collective action plan for embedding open scholarship considerations within hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure guidelines, respecting institutional and disciplinary differences.
Shared Open Scholarship Infrastructure
Developing a framework of key considerations that go into informed decision-making for infrastructure development, beyond just, “what does it cost?”
Good Practices in Open Scholarship
Curating current good practices resources that institutions can adapt and adopt and scoping an on-demand open scholarship support service.
Cross-Sector Alignment
Catalyzing discussion between the scholarly community and other relevant groups (funders, societies, government agencies, etc.)…”
June HELIOS Newsletter — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship
“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….”
COAPI Community Call: HELIOS – SPARC
“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) is a network of 78 colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship across their campuses. HELIOS takes place within the larger context of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, which brings together key interested parties — including senior leadership at universities, federal agencies, philanthropies, international bodies, and other strategic organizations — to better incentivize openness, in service of a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem. Ultimately, HELIOS and the NASEM Roundtable aim to ensure that as many students, faculty, practitioners, policy makers, and community members as possible have access to, and a voice in, research and scholarship.”
June 2022 Librarian Community Call | June 14, 2022
“The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) is a network of 77 colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship across their campuses. HELIOS takes place within the larger context of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science (NASEM), which brings together key interested parties — including senior leadership at universities, federal agencies, philanthropies, international bodies, and other strategic organizations — to better incentivize openness, in service of a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem. Ultimately, HELIOS and the NASEM Roundtable aim to ensure that as many students, faculty, practitioners, policy makers, and community members as possible have access to, and a voice in, research and scholarship. Join Greg Tananbaum and Caitlin Carter to learn more and discuss how you can be an advocate for these initiatives within your institution.”
How does open science ‘democratise’ and ‘collectivise’ research? – Samuel Moore
“Yet it isn’t clear what the relationship is between the greater sharing of research materials and the so-called democratisation at work in open science. What actually is democratising and collectivising about what HELIOS is trying to do?
It is important to ask this question because HELIOS is, by all accounts, a top-down initiative led by senior figures of research-intensive universities in the US. Despite the casual association between open science and collectivity, it appears that HELIOS is more a way for university leaders to coerce researchers into a cultural change, not something that is led by the research community at large. While changing tenure guidelines to prioritise publishing in open access journals, sharing FAIR data and releasing reusable open code may have some good outcomes, they are not themselves the basis for greater collective governance of science. Instead, these changes will provide an economic reason for researchers to adopt open science practices, a reason still based on individual progress within the academy….”