University of Vermont
Changing University-Wide Review, Promotion, and Tenure Guidelines to Reward Open Scholarship
The University of Vermont (UVM) took bold steps to modernize its incentive systems, leaning into the land-grant institution’s mission to serve the public good and maximize the influence of its research. Keeping those values at the center of the process helped motivate UVM to become a leader in evaluation policies that embrace open practices.
In 2023 UVM passed a Faculty Senate Resolution calling on all colleges and schools at UVM to review their structures, incentives, and policies in hiring, review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) and to revise their standards to incentivize open scholarship (also see UVM’s guide). The Resolution strongly encourages all faculty for whom research is part of their appointment to join in this commitment, and for these faculty members and their chairs to highlight and value examples of this commitment in their RPT materials.
Interim President Patricia Prelock, who served as provost when the Faculty Senate approved the Resolution, believed major movement toward open practices could occur if faculty members were rewarded for their efforts.
Empowered by President Prelock, who wanted to support a culture that celebrates open scholarship, UVM’s dean of libraries (Bryn Geffert), faculty senate president (Tom Borchert), and professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences (Meredith Niles), began steering and socializing actions stemming from the 2023 Resolution.
Laying the foundation with information
The genesis of the resolution can be traced back to 2021 when the university faced some financial challenges stemming from the pandemic, and the library walked away from its big deal journal package with Elsevier , according to Geffert. In talking with the faculty about the need to make painful cuts, the library used the opportunity to explain the shortcomings in the scholarly communication ecosystem: the unsustainable rise in journal prices, the gifting of publicly funded research to private companies, and the disconnect between a land-grant university’s commitment to making knowledge universally available and publishing models that lock scholarship behind paywalls. This awareness-raising exercise helped educate the campus and laid the groundwork for future support of open scholarship.
Language in the resolution referenced the university’s commitment to sharing and applying knowledge and described how scholarly output sharing, or open scholarship, contributes to this goal. Embedding and leading with those values enabled the faculty to understand how open practices aligned with the university’s goals, Geffert said.
Answering questions across campus: forming the president’s “implementation team”
The senate members who crafted and promoted the resolution thought it was very important to have a college-driven approach rather than an institutional mandate for open scholarship. The implementation team (Geffert, Borchert, and Niles) developed frequently asked questions (FAQ) about open scholarship and asked for time on all of the colleges’ faculty meeting agendas to talk about how the resolution might be implemented. There were many questions about open access; faculty asked probing questions about legalities, time commitments, contractual allowances, intellectual freedom, various means of making scholarship open (e.g., gold, green, and diamond models), the relationship of the resolution to federal mandates, the effects of open scholarship on existing publishing venues, how much time the process of complying with emerging public access policies and sharing data openly would take, and the practical mechanisms of depositing an author-accepted manuscript.
Interim President Prelock and the implementation team understood and made clear that reform would take time and look different in every college, depending on their timeframes, discipline-specific needs, and faculty priorities.
One college’s journey to a comprehensive statement:
Niles, an influential faculty member and researcher at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), serves on the college’s tenure and promotion committee. Niles' research into faculty evaluation processes and perceptions for advancement has been instrumental in helping HELIOS Open leaders understand where there are opportunities to modernize how we prioritize open scholarship within our evaluation criteria. She worked with the CALS’ Dean’s leadership team to help craft its newly adopted criteria, and CALS was one of the first colleges at UVM to change and adopt revisions to its RPT guidelines.
UVM CALS Open Scholarship Motivation Statement
In a recent presentation to HELIOS Open administrators, Niles emphasized the statement she bolded in the image above: the college notes its commitment to extension and democratizing knowledge by making it available to the public. Articulating these values helped shape the new guidelines that incorporate evidence of open scholarship in various forms:
“Evidence of open scholarship comes in many forms, including open access peer-reviewed publications, briefs, reports, or scholarly manuscripts; the deposit of different versions of scholarly products (e.g., preprints, authors’ accepted manuscripts, or final articles) made immediately available through open repositories such as ScholarWorks or preprint repositories; observed degree of collaboration and team research; the deposit of data, code, and software in open repositories (e.g., GitHub or discipline specific data repositories); the creation of open source software or platforms; the presence of an ORCID and/or online profiles with links to full, free public access scholarly works; professional and/or juried images or other forms of media that relate to one’s creative work; and other forms of public dissemination that advance UVM’s public-facing mission. We strongly encourage all faculty for whom research is part of their appointment to join in this commitment and for these faculty members, and their chairs, to highlight and value examples of this commitment in their review, promotion, and tenure materials.”
Niles shared lessons learned from the college’s experience. First, it took time; it took years for UVM to get to the point where it had a concrete open scholarship statement in any RPT guidelines at the college level. Second, it’s a process. Niles hopes the language will be improved in the future; but CALS’ language is a start. Third, she acknowledged the language adopted by CALS may not be relevant for other units, customization is to be expected, and flexibility is necessary to scale the effort. Finally, CALS committed to the term open scholarship, rather than open science, which was intentional in order to be inclusive and inviting to all disciplines and perspectives.
In total, four colleges have made changes to their guidelines:
The College of Education and Social Sciences: evidence of high-quality scholarship is primarily evidenced by the publication of refereed scholarly research articles in top-tier journals (including specialist and general where appropriate), books published by highly regarded presses, and competitive national, international, or state grants which advance, integrate, apply, and/or transform knowledge. Such publications include open access work, where possible, and video articles in ASL. (adopted November 2024)
The College of Nursing and Health Sciences: publishing scholarly work in professional journals, books; including indexed open access journals and publications; presenting scholarly work; submitting grants (internal and/or extramural) for funding or conducting funded research contributing to the research field by engaging in other scholarly activities (see examples below) (August 2024)
The Larner College of Medicine Standards: scholarship in the field of education can be demonstrated through contributions such as curriculum development and dissemination, development of new teaching strategies, creation of novel teaching modules or development of new assessment tools. New modalities of scholarship such as blogs, virtual textbooks or similar are also recognized with documentation of dissemination and effectiveness. LCOM values and is committed to open scholarship that promotes open access of sharing scholarly output. (April 2024)
Creating and supporting an open scholarship culture on campus
Beyond changes focused specifically on tenure-track faculty, UVM is pursuing a variety of strategies to support faculty, postdocs, staff and students to embrace open scholarship. UVM’s Interim President Prelock’s championing of these efforts has been central to their success. The provost and her implementation team have developed academic success goals and metrics to track the production and dissemination of open scholarship at UVM.
The University Libraries also appointed a scholarly communications librarian to assist with open publishing, data archiving and distribution of research.
In 2024, Prelock initiated a partnership with NASA to bring its Open Science 101 curriculum to UVM graduate students, post-doctoral students, and junior faculty. In collaboration with NASA, UVM sponsored the Data + Open Science Summit in January 2025 for current students, staff or faculty to explore open science and data practices including machine learning and data visualization.
To further advance open scholarship on campus, UVM obtained a grant from the Sloan Foundation to form the Vermont Research Open Source Program Office (VERSO). It supports the open source community in fostering sustainable innovation through education, fellowships, research, and collaboration. VERSO aims to create an effortless open-source ecosystem on and off campus, growing a diverse community while building the necessary infrastructure to support open-source software development at UVM.
