Collaborating to build a more open scholarly ecosystem

About

The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) is a cohort of colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship within and across their campuses. Leaders from US colleges and universities have joined this community of practice, working together to promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.

Read the 2024 HELIOS Open Program Plan.

What Is “Open Scholarship"?

Open scholarship (sometimes called “open science” or “open research”) is an expansive term meant to encompass the rapid and widespread sharing of a range of scholarly activities and outputs, across disciplines. Open scholarship promotes inclusivity, transparent and trustworthy research, innovation, and collaboration.

HELIOS Open Background

HELIOS Open emerges from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. This multi-year project brings together key interested parties -- including senior leadership at universities, federal agencies, philanthropies, international bodies, and other strategic organizations -- to rethink research evaluation to better incentivize and reward openness and transparency. As part of this work, a Roundtable workshop introduced an open science toolkit – a set of resources that can help key sectors “discuss, develop, and deploy open scholarship incentivization plans (e.g., academic hiring, tenure and promotion, and grants) that are both consistent with common norms and appropriate for their specific communities.” Higher education leaders who are Roundtable members leveraged the toolkit to issue a “dear colleague” letter to their peers in mid-2021, along with a succinct Guide to Supporting Open Scholarship for University Presidents and Provosts. The letter included a clear call to action: “Now is the time for colleges and universities to support open scholarship, sharing research results of all kinds openly as early as practical.” A fall 2021 virtual meeting drew participants from dozens of institutions and confirmed a collective will to answer this call. The Roundtable is facilitating the HELIOS Open cohort 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.

Theory of Change

A unified theory of change has been honed across three years and hundreds of NASEM Roundtable-inspired conversations, positing the need for “mutually reinforcing vectors” in support of open scholarship. This is an environment in which the guidance and rewards researchers receive from their department chairs, university leadership, funders, professional societies, and others consistently point toward open. Such a system would more coherently align values (why we do the work we do), practices (how we do that work), and incentives (how we are recognized and rewarded).

The Roundtable events have featured perspectives from a plethora of researchers and scholars, consistently indicating that (a) their work is motivated by values like transparency, replicability and reproducibility, and an accelerated pace of discovery; (b) they would like to engage in open practices like FAIR data, open access, and preregistration that align with these values; and (c) this alignment would be substantially easier to actualize if reward structures like funding and tenure & promotion provided clear incentives.