Spotlight Series Recap: Incentivizing Open in Reappointment, Promotion, Tenure, and Hiring
On March 22, 2023 the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) convened academic leaders to discuss incentivizing open scholarship practices in hiring, reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT).
Erin McKiernan, ORFG’s community manager, is also a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She moderated the session and started by sharing how close this topic is to her personally and professionally. Over the last few years she has worked with the ScholComm Lab, analyzing promotion and tenure guidelines at over a 100 institutions across the US. She also recently went through the promotion and tenure process herself. Despite the positive outcome, the process highlighted key challenges within current assessment frameworks and inconsistencies in what institutions value in their reward structures.
Read more about the ScholComm Lab’s RPT project on their blog.
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.
Specifically, in analyzing tenure and promotion policies, the word “public” is mostly mentioned in the “service” category, which is a traditionally undervalued area, and one that often falls largely to women and minorities and other underrepresented groups at our institutions. When analyzing words like “impact” and “metrics,” traditional outputs like journal articles appeared as valued in a large percentage of documents. Open access came up in a very small percentage of documents, and often with negative connotations. There are clear opportunities for institutions to reform and improve these processes so that they incentivize these public aspects of faculty work.
McKiernan then introduced the panelists: Thad Potter, a 6th year PhD Candidate and the president of the National Association of Graduate- Professional Students; Sara Weston, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon; and Alzada Tipton, Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Whitman College and co-lead for HELIOS Open’s Institutional and Departmental Policy Working Group. The following is a summary of the question and answer session.
How are you currently involved in RPT and hiring reform or advocacy?
Thad Potter: I'd love to see mentoring and student development included in our efforts to reform RPT. We recently partnered with the American Medical Student Association earlier this year, and wrote a piece called “Time to Reform Academic Publishing” in Issues in Science and Technology. In the article, we reflected on the recent White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” and its relevance to early career researchers. Our current incentives within institutions do not align with goals of open scholarship and public access like equity. Change will be necessary to help support a more equitable system, and, for early-career researchers, these topics are increasingly important.
Sara Weston: My work is broadly at the intersection of individual differences in psychology and health. When I was hired I was hired under a job advertisement that specifically called for scholars who engaged in open science. When I arrived, I realized that even though I and a couple of colleagues had been hired with open science backgrounds, those values weren't reflected in our department’s tenure and promotion guidelines. I joined a two-person task force to revise our guidelines, and in doing so, met with many colleagues about what should be valued in tenure. We also explored how our values as a department could be better integrated into our policies, and developed a series of recommendations for changing our department guidelines. These recommendations have gone through a couple rounds of revisions, and now sit with our provost. Unfortunately, the momentum has slowed as we wait, and I’m happy to talk about why I think that's happened, and some of the things that we could do to push it through.
I would also like to second the importance of mentoring, which is an important part of public engagement as well. It prepares students to practice publicly engaged scholarship. We also need to make sure that when we’re doing this work, we're not leaving people behind or making it more difficult for people to engage in open and public scholarship.
Alzada Tipton: I'm an unusual person to be included on this panel because I'm not a scientist, but, when Whitman College was invited to become part of HELIOS Open, I was happy to step forward to co-lead the Institutional and Departmental Policy working group. It’s been a really interesting and terrific experience for me.
As the chief academic officer, I’ve witnessed a lot of faculty go through the RPT process. Before I arrived at Whitman, the institution had gone through a process to try to understand how to recognize diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism in RPT guidelines.
Whitman also received two Mellon grants for community engaged learning, with the goal to understand how to better recognize community engaged learning in RPT. The great thing about being a small Liberal Arts college in a small community is that there truly is this desire to share scholarship not only with the colleagues down the hallway, but also with the larger community.
The HELIOS Open working group I co-lead drafted a Joint Statement on Reforming Hiring, Reappointment, Tenure, and Promotion. The statement asks institutions to commit to engaging in a dialogue on developing and advancing hiring and RPT reform strategies that reflect the importance of open research and scholarship in shaping a positive research culture and achieving institutional missions. My president, who is a physicist, and the tenure and promotion committee signed on to the statement agreeing to revisit our RPT guidelines.
How can researchers at different stages (graduate students, professors at different stages, administration) push forward RPT and hiring reform?
Potter: I think there are inherent challenges for graduate students engaging in incentive structures or reform because we are in a strange spot on the student-to-employee spectrum. Graduate students’ roles change over the course of our time at the institution, and we are a very diverse group. I started my Ph. D. program by taking classes as I did as an undergraduate student, but, by the end of the program, my day to day life looks nothing like an undergraduate student’s, and the goal of a Ph. D. program is to elevate us to be peers to our instructors.
Defining incentives for students can be challenging because the career path out of graduate school is often varied. Many might go into the academies, which have a very different set of activities for students to undertake before they graduate than those who might go into industry, public policy, or other careers. Building an incentive structure around these different paths is difficult. I’m a big fan of developing an individual development plan, recognizing it's hard to mandate specific actions for the varied graduate student goals.
Our current system often incentivizes publishing in specific journals, but this is a challenge for many early career researchers who may not be able to pay high article processing charges (APC) some of the publishers levy to make scholarship open. Going from ‘pay to read’ to ‘pay to publish,’ doesn't seem ideal.
Weston: Starting at my institution with open science in the job description, I wish I had asked more about how the department is currently or planning to support open science. One thing I didn't recognize when I was interviewing as a postdoc is that there are opportunities to negotiate and bargain, and we should teach that to graduate students. You can ask for policy change.
When working on RPT materials at the University of Oregon, we were trying to address open science in a very broad way: through open access publishing, through recognizing forms of transparency, and through valuing community engagement and community-based participatory science. We ended up focusing solely on guidelines that increased transparency. I think we found ourselves fighting against the “bean counting” mentality that often happens in RPT: how many citations do you have? What's your h-index? How many of these journals did you publish in? Instead, we tried to advocate for painting a fuller picture of what a researcher’s science is like, what their science philosophy includes, how they approached research in general, and how they demonstrate their values through their work.
The changes meant more work for people applying for tenure, including more statements or annotated CVs. As a junior faculty member, I think it was important to say I'm willing to do more work in order to be assessed on more than my number of papers.
When we brought the recommendations to the department, we discovered this conversation is not solely about tenure; it’s tenure, promotion, and merit, which affects everyone in the department. Faculty members who are extremely prolific, including very senior researchers who have many collaborators and students, were concerned about undertaking more work to annotate every publication that goes on their CV. Many also questioned how external reviewers will handle any changes to the process because we don't have control over whether or not external reviewers will value bean counting or honor our new approaches. I found that point of contention very frustrating because we do have a choice as to whether we use letters from external reviewers. We could choose to say “this person didn't read our guidelines or didn't evaluate the candidate based on the things that we value.”
I think this is why HELIOS Open is really important. If many institutions sign on and signal they value transparency and openness, and then agree to teach our faculty how to review other people through that lens, it gives that credibility back to departments. It helps to move us along together and trust that reviewers from other institutions will value the same activities.
Tipton: Before I get into the question you asked, I want to underline something that Sara said about being able to ask for guidelines or policies upon hire. That's a really important point, and I want people to know that is exactly the right moment to do it; that's the time when a hiring person is looking for something that can bring the person to the institution, complete the search, and ensure it’s successful. At Whitman, we have memorandums of understanding with faculty who bring something different to the appointment.
From an administrator’s point of view and from my experience at small liberal arts colleges, it can already be quite difficult to jam our work into three traditional buckets: research, teaching, and service. It’s an asset that much of our work happens across the three areas. However, it becomes difficult to truly recognize this asset in the moment of tenure and promotion to associate professor, where the buckets often become much more distinct. We must develop a more generous way of recognizing work across the three areas.
While we are a bit more free of the bean counting we see at other institutions, we do value peer review. However, we operate in the current system with a volunteer community managed by closed access journals, and our tenure case reviewers are also volunteers. We must take a step back and consider that many of our RPT guidelines were written 20 to 30 years ago and our system relies heavily on volunteer labor under this less than ideal system. We need to think about how we work through the bottlenecks of closed access journals and, instead, work together with the many others focused on moving knowledge forward to support the scholarship of our colleagues without resting on closed structures just because it’s what we are used to.
How do we capitalize on our shared interest to effect change considering we have allies in the federal government, within student groups, and among higher education leaders?
Potter: It’s hard to directly engage with the faculty assessment process. Oftentimes, students aren't in the room when assessment and incentives are discussed, and we’re rarely part of that decision making process. I try to be involved in as much as I can, but it's hard to kind of do that on a local and national level. I try to make connections to junior faculty because they are the closest removed from my status as a student, and will one day be running the departments. It can be difficult to get tenured professors to do new things that they’re not already required or incentivized to do. However, it’s important to participate and take a step back and look at the broader picture to make better systems.
Weston: All professors have to engage in service, and while we generally try to protect junior faculty from doing too much at first, there are always opportunities to be engaged in something and to bring a concern at faculty meetings. Consider speaking up while honoring the bandwidth you have to take on service.
It’s also important to bring our colleagues who are a little bit less engaged into the conversation. Consider talking about open scholarship with your graduate mentor or other faculty members. Maybe if we had more people than just me asking about this, there would be quicker movement and more support for collective action.
Tipton: An interesting dynamic I’m seeing is that, for the more faculty oriented people in the virtual HELIOS Open working group meetings, some are pointing to the provost as an obstacle to RPT reform. As the provost, I’ve always said “well, it’s about the faculty.” I do believe that the faculty need to be the leaders in pushing for reform, while recognizing that many people dislike change or are extremely busy to the point where asking them to take on anything can feel quite burdensome. I can work with the faculty on the guidelines and recommendations they come up with and be supportive of their efforts.
I also want to reflect on Sara’s remarks and my thoughts about pre-tenured faculty who feel like they can't speak up about things, and to post-tenure faculty who feel like it’s no longer their problem to reform RPT. We need faculty to be willing to be leaders in this important issue. Sara’s voice, for example, is so important.
A way to push reform forward with colleagues may include talking about what open scholarship enables as part of others’ priorities for reforming RPT guidelines. For example, diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism is crucial to my faculty, and we can advance these efforts by opening up scholarship. Similarly, outside of the sciences, many faculty value public facing humanities work at Whitman. It has expanded our definition of “scholarship,” and provides us an opportunity to ask our faculty how we can give full credit for this work that they are so passionate about, and where they feel like they are making such a difference.
When we think about the college's mission, this is another entry into the reform conversation. Our mission statements often reflect the hope that we make a difference in the world, so why would we not reward activities that enable mission fulfillment. These are activities that would make a provost’s heart very happy.
McKiernan concluded the session by sharing the need to flip the narrative that reforming RPT in support of open scholarship’s goals is onerous, or an action that forces our faculty via unfunded mandates related to grant compliance. Instead, we want researchers to be credited for enabling our missions, for activities that go beyond bean counting, and for activities that are often relegated to the service bucket or other lower assessment categories.
