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….”

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….”

New Initiative Incentivizes Open Research | The Scientist Magazine®

“A large coalition of colleges and universities aims to change hiring, promotion, and tenure practices to reward collaboration….

As Bahlai’s experience shows, scientists aren’t always rewarded for conducting research in accordance with open science principles. A new initiative plans to change that. The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship, or HELIOS, which launched this March, is a coalition of more than 75 member colleges and universities that have committed to fostering open science practices, including through their hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions….

“The scientists bought into it,” Yamamoto says, adding that he doesn’t blame Lewin for coming up with an innovative marketing strategy. The journals wouldn’t have succeeded in shifting the culture if the scientific community hadn’t bought into the concepts of prestige and status, he says.

 

Yamamoto says this competition to publish work in prestigious journals led to an emphasis on individual contributions over collaboration in academia today. For example, tenure committees heavily weigh publication as a first or senior author, especially in prestigious journals—a process that can take several years, delaying when others have access to advances in scientific knowledge, he says. Yamamoto says it’s also common for committees to completely disregard papers where the tenure candidate is listed as a middle author.

Those individualistic values aren’t limited to universities and colleges. Grant agencies, for example, may decide to deny funding to a group of researchers if they get scooped by another team investigating a similar problem, Yamamoto says.

 

“So those kinds of values and practices then serve a very strong disincentive for an investigator to practice open science,” he says….

HELIOS wants to bend academia’s incentive structures toward cultivating collaboration. To accomplish this, like-minded institutions have gathered several times since 2021—beginning with a roundtable discussion convened by the National Academy of Sciences—to discuss priorities and strategies. The proceedings of a 2021 member workshop, “Developing a Toolkit for Open Science Practices,” includes language that institutions can use to show students and faculty their commitment to open science. The toolkit also includes templates for evaluating open science practices in job and tenure applications with example criteria including publishing in open-access journals, posting data using FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles, and sharing other research outputs such as computer code….

Mangravite says she “one hundred percent” sees this divide between senior and junior faculty. But she says that rather than waiting for older faculty to retire, what’s needed is to incentivize younger faculty to participate in open science now instead of continuing to hold them to traditional standards set by more senior academics….”

 

The University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines – SPARC

“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….”

 

HELIOS 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). HELIOS 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.