Introducing Danny Anderson, President Emeritus, Trinity University, and Special Advisor to HELIOS Open
Throughout his academic career, Danny Anderson has recognized the value and promise of open scholarship. He joins HELIOS Open as Special Advisor and Executive Council Chair, leading a group of presidents and provosts invested in guiding HELIOS Open’s work to support incentives reform to explicitly reward open science and scholarship.
Biography: Anderson earned his bachelor of art’s degree in Spanish from Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and his master’s and doctorate in Spanish at the University of Kansas (KU). He started at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) as an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese. He went on to KU where he was a faculty member for 26 years, and dean of the College of Liberal Arts for five. Anderson served as president of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, from 2015-2022. Since retiring to Redlands, California, he has been working as an executive coach.
How did you become interested in open scholarship?
I spent most of my career as a faculty member at the University of Kansas (KU) in the field of Mexican literature. As a faculty member, I became aware of skyrocketing subscription costs and how they can erode library budgets. Our provost, David Shulenburger, was actively raising awareness and seeking solutions, and I got involved. Open access publishing was just starting. I joined early conversations about ensuring scholarly outputs disseminated through open access practices can be seen as of the same quality as traditional subscription and paywalled publications.
Since those initial faculty experiences, I have held various leadership roles that expanded my perspective on the importance of open access for faculty and research, for the needs of different disciplines, and for reclaiming faculty ownership of their research products. While I served as vice provost, I regularly attended faculty senate meetings. I recall a key meeting where faculty introduced and debated a new open access policy. During deliberation, strong emotions drove the conversation, including fear of change and misperceptions of open access publications. The motion was about to be defeated, but we began to discuss the processes and criteria scholars use to evaluate quality. Faculty representatives felt secure that they could trust the evaluation process they had created, and this changed the tide of the conversation. The faculty senate decided to take a chance and the policy was approved.
“The open access policy conversation reminded faculty that, as a community, we decide what is high quality; the outlet does not. ”
It was a galvanizing moment that pulled our faculty together to think about our research resources and values. We considered how we were standing up for the quality of research at our institution. Approving this open access policy gave the institution and its faculty a new way to focus on the assessment of research. KU was the first public research university to develop an open access policy, following similar policies at private schools – Harvard, MIT, and the Stanford School of Education.
Working collaboratively with champions was also valuable and deepened my interest in open scholarship. I worked with Lorraine Haricombe, then director of university libraries, at KU, and now the vice provost and director of UT libraries in Austin, Texas. I learned from her the different ways we can broaden the sense of what openness means to a library and the entire campus.
As president of Trinity University, I was pleased to continue participating in the broader effort to support and encourage sharing scholarship openly. SPARC invited me to speak at a conference about open access. My goal was to help librarians think about the concerns of presidents and provosts to help them refine their talking points as they sought greater participation from campus leaders in the open access movement. In 2019, I served on the National Academies Roundtable for Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship. It’s one task to advocate for open access to support library budgets; it’s another challenge to figure out a process for incentivizing open scholarship behaviors among faculty and scholars, including sharing research outputs openly. My awareness deepened as I examined the trends in open scholarship, and pondered the need for significant change in faculty promotion and tenure policies. There are emerging research products that don’t fit the romantic concepts of individual originality. Promotion and tenure policies have to catch up in order to recognize and reward scholars who are changing their fields with new paradigms of practice for example, data sharing, sharing articles in open repositories, preprinting, etc. The change may seem daunting, but through shared governance processes, we wrote the rules. Through the same processes, we can change the rules to fit our current or changing circumstances.
It’s exciting to see how at some institutions the faculty senate, an influential dean, or an insightful department chair might be leading the way. At other institutions, the presidents and provosts have become champions.
Open scholarship is crucial for faculty careers, collaboration, and competition for grants. Forward-thinking institutions are adapting their tenure and promotion policies to encourage cutting-edge research and scholarship. Today, through HELIOS Open member institutions, I’m working with presidents, provosts, and senior research officers who are interested in taking action to support and develop incentives for open science and scholarship activities for faculty on their campuses.
What works in getting traction and support for open scholarship?
As an administrator, our function is to serve our faculty colleagues and help them be successful at their job. This means you have to think about their needs and motivations.
Open science practices, like making data and papers accessible and transparent, are among the ways that early career scholars can ensure the quality of their research in an era of concern about reproducibility. Sharing openly enables other individuals to reproduce an individual’s work, validating findings in new and rigorous ways. Because such validation is essential for the impact of their work, it helps them become better scientists. When data is shared more openly, it can speed up their work, and enable more interactions with the research.
Second, many early career researchers experience a dissonance between what they consider cutting edge research and what they hear on their campus about tenure and promotion expectations from senior colleagues.
“There is a tension between originality based in individualism and openness based in community.”
Our colleagues who work in open scholarship want individual recognition and reward for their contributions, which is why it’s important to think about how open science is written into promotion and tenure standards for the individual as well as for collaborative or team efforts. And the same faculty members also want scholarship impact in the world. They want their work to be real, and to be out there, accessible, and doing things that improve society. Open is a modality that creates a greater sense of reliability for the scientific endeavor.
Faculty members today often experience negative pressure given the public questioning of higher education’s value. Open science enables transparency into the scholarly activities on a campus, and can give a public view into its work. It is my hope that this kind of thorough transparency can demonstrate higher education’s value and combat the misperception that higher education creates a secret or elite group of insiders. Similarly, federal agencies fund a great deal of this research, and agencies are also embracing the ethos of open scholarship because it improves the quality of research and ensures public access to the research products the public funds.
Describe your work with HELIOS Open and how it has evolved.
HELIOS Open emerged as a formal organization in 2022, just as I was retiring. I was one of the National Academies Roundtable presidents who cosigned the call to action letter that led to the creation of HELIOS Open. I was contacted later to facilitate a NASA-funded meeting of presidents and provosts in January 2024. We gathered to discuss their role in modernizing tenure, promotion, review, and hiring to explicitly reward open science and scholarship activities. My role now is as a special advisor seeking to engage senior leaders and build our Executive Council of presidents and provosts guiding the work. This is a key moment, aligned with major policy changes, to think about how to effectively communicate, listen, and keep engagement strong.
What kind of feedback are you getting from administrators about advancing open practices?
I have seen presidents and provosts energized as they grasp the impact of open scholarship. They become engaged and excited partners with campus champions for open scholarship. For example, the provost at the University of Vermont, Patty Prelock, is energized about open scholarship because the faculty senate issued a resolution calling for the university to develop open science and open data policies and practices to facilitate their work. We look for those bright spots that are giving us models for how things can evolve. We want to share those stories, while respecting campus differences and local context. We want to encourage leaders to look at a model and adapt institutional change tactics to fit their institution.
We’ve also heard from and amplified department leaders who have had success. The University of Maryland Department of Psychology is an example of how to update promotion and tenure standards with open practices in mind. Michael Dougherty has shared the steps he took alongside his faculty to update hiring and advancement policies. He shares his story as a template that others are invited to use or adapt. The examples of individual champions having an impact on their campus community are fundamental for the change process underway at present.
Why do campus leaders need to take a position on open scholarship?
Campus leaders are most effective when they know how to be champions for ensuring that their faculty are effective – in the classroom, in the laboratory, in their research, and in their creative endeavors. Open science and open data are there to serve faculty, to help them be more effective and efficient.
Each president and provost has an opportunity to understand their institution’s unique story and help faculty stand out with the impact of their research, creative endeavors, and scholarship.
Presidents and provosts are effective in thinking about policy and taking action when there is energy emerging from the faculty to make a change. Campus leaders need to be ready to help guide energy and passion toward goals that are meaningful to ensure that open science achieves the goal of having better, faster, and transparent results.
What are you most excited about for the future?
I’m excited by the deep conversations currently underway to ensure open scholarship practices flourish and that faculty will be recognized and rewarded for their important contributions. This effort began originally in libraries and with individual researchers. Today, there is a robust conversation that includes grant officers from federal funding agencies and private philanthropies as organizations consider how to invest in research and scholarship that make a difference in society. Universities are engaged in this conversation at a time when we are often feeling like divisions can create barriers to working together.
Through my work with HELIOS Open and its 100+ institutional members, I see individuals across so many different organizations finding ways to form truly meaningful partnerships. That is the kind of collaboration that will help us strengthen the quality of scholarship and its impact on our world.
