Spotlight Series Recap: Open Source, Tech Transfer & Commercialization
On November 15th, 2022, the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) convened academic leaders to discuss their open source, code, and software sharing efforts. This blog post summarizes key themes from the session.
The session was moderated by Drew Endy, Martin Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, where he is also faculty co-director of degree programs at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka Stanford’s d.school). He’s also served as a member of NASEM’s Standing Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. As a bioengineer working in synthetic biology, Dr. Endy and his teams have made many contributions to open biotechnology, especially with material transfer agreements (MTA), which are typically bilateral contracts that govern the sharing of physical samples used in life science research. Most MTAs in biotech and academia prohibit redistribution of received materials and also sharing with commercial partners. While often appropriate, these restrictions can hinder translation of materials that could otherwise be freely shared.
Thus, Drew’s team created the OpenMTA as an option to conventional MTAs. The OpenMTA purposefully allows both redistribution of received materials and distribution to commercial partners. About 100 institutions already support the OpenMTA so that students and researchers have the option of more readily sharing materials in support of innovation and translation, which are shared goals of our collective HELIOS Open work.
The next contributor was Alexander Amini, Postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Dr. Amini described creating and open sourcing VISTA to the public. He and his team are working on and have open sourced a data-driven simulator, built and rendered using raw data from the real world. Their vision for VISTA is that it serves as a step toward building a more sustainable and resilient mobility path for the future of transportation.
With autonomous vehicles and robotics, realizing a society with embedded autonomous vehicles can be difficult. You can train your systems in the real world, but doing so is both time intensive and dangerous. Simulation presents opportunities to train in a much safer, controlled environment. Yet, reality gaps exist even today's best simulators, discouraging direct transfer into the real world. The VISTA approach leverages real data sets to build and scalably engineer synthetic simulated worlds.
Developing this fully data-driven approach presents a very interesting problem for open source, Amini described, because you're not just open sourcing software; you are also open sourcing the data that drives that software. VISTA can harness the power of the data available to synthesize these highly realistic, high fidelity, and scalable data sets, including data on cases that are normally too expensive and dangerous to collect when testing in the real world.
In the autonomous vehicle community, autonomous vehicle companies, and those that are considered leading pioneers, are building up closed source simulation engines. Without unifying across these engines, and without a unified testing framework for different pipelines, it is difficult for the government to regulate and evaluate what it means to have a good autonomous solution that can be deployed into society. By open sourcing the code, Amini and team are enabling safe and data-driven environments, allowing creators to unify around good governance of artificial intelligence policies.
Since open sourcing VISTA a few months ago, it has amassed over 7,000 independent installations with about a 100 new installations of the simulation engine every week. The team is excited about VISTA’s unique ability to create immersive virtual worlds.
Following Dr. Amini was Julieta Arancio, Postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society and at the University of Bath
Open hardware is the practice of licensing the designs of a physical object in a way that allows the object to be studied, modified, created, and distributed by anyone.
Dr. Arancio began by reflecting on an academic culture where commercialization is embedded into research training early and by design. When researchers develop a new design that includes a hardware component, they work with Technology Transfer Offices (TTO), and the TTO decides if the invention is patentable or not. It is a huge investment for colleges and universities, and the process has several challenges, including a lack of transparency and other considerations:
Journals often do not include ancillary or contextual information about hardware designs, which is needed for reproducibility.
The current academic culture can encourage secrecy, which slows down innovation, and rewards commercialization over sharing and collaboration. Some key designs are protected, precluding creation on top of the original design.
Choosing not to patent some inventions leads to missed opportunities for greater impact.
In advocating for open hardware, Arancio encouraged researchers to think beyond, “is my invention patentable or non patentable?” and look to opportunities. Consider openly licensing hardware designs with TTOs as partners. Good open hardware design is accompanied by documentation, including design files, the source code, and other layers of instruction. This lowers the barrier for collaboration and allows new communities to emerge. Open hardware also encourages reproducibility and innovation.
In the last 5 years we have seen open science hardware business models emerge. Arancio provided three examples of open hardware businesses. These organizations operate by protecting trademarks and selling specific components (kits, devices, and other physical objects), design services, and technical support expertise.
Open Ephys, a company building open source tools for neuroscience. Hardware researchers are tinkering all the time with their tools, adapting them to new research questions. Open Ephys is showcasing and making accessible incredible designs that they think deserve more recognition. They also advocate for open standards. They provide technical support, training, and warranty.
OpenTrons, a company that produces robots for experimentation. You can add modules to your robot as needed. OpenTrons offers a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce results. They are also advocate for open protocols that increase reducibility.
OpenFlexure Microscope, a company that offers a design for a fully 3D printed, customizable, open-source optical microscope. The microscope includes excellent documentation online and has a robust community supporting it. Users include community scientists in Argentina, medical doctors in the US, and malaria researchers in Tanzania.
Arancio asserted the importance of shifting the way we train and support researchers. We must show students that there is more to innovation than patenting, and that you can grow professionally if you do open work.
She closed with several thought-provoking questions:
Could we ask researchers to share designs through institutional repositories, could we ask funders to mandate open hardware, and can TTOs adopt open licensing practices? There are procurement strategies that can change to promote open hardware. Better science enables more research questions and the ability to access and modify existing tools to create new knowledge.
Our final speaker was Sayeed Choudhury, Director of the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Choudhury spoke about Open Source Program Offices (OSPO), their relationship to TTOs, and opportunities for collaboration for impact. At a college or university, researchers work with TTOs to commercialize and grow impact. Choudhury argued that OSPOs can serve a major role, and asserted that software is the most important output to share to enable reproducibility.
Choudhury provided background on three new federal memos that include code and software sharing components:
The Department of Defense (DoD) has a long history of working with open source software. DoD affirms, from both the consumption and production perspective of software, that we need to be open by default. This kind of design principle was an important underpinning for the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, with DoD involved in both.
The recent White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo focuses on procurement issues for open source software. It includes a statement about “vendors” needing to attest that they are complying with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) framework for secure software. It is unclear who or what constitutes a “vendor” or how such attestations would be made for open source software.
The Nelson Memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) builds upon the 2013 memo, and requires all federally funded research articles be open immediately upon publication in an agency-designated repository. The memo does not directly mention software, but does open up the option to share other research outputs like code and software. It represents public access interest shifting from articles to data. Software is arguably next in terms of attention and policy.
He believes we have a collective opportunity to influence the federal government, including the OSTP, as they move forward in their thinking about open source software. OSPO++, funded by the Sloan Foundation, is a network formed around university-based OSPOs and some government-based open source offices. He believes forming a network of universities to explore collective conversations around open source is a good approach to influencing and encouraging software sharing policies.
Choudhury put forward the following takeaways he learned from his own experience and conversations with the federal government:
We should be proactive, not reactive, in encouraging OSTP to develop software sharing policies. We need to work across sectors and among institutions in partnership to inform the next instantiation around open source software, particularly as it relates to lessons learned from responses for public access to articles and data.
Consider OSPOs as organizational APIs that can help design and support the OSTP’s consideration of public access to open source software, including agency designated repositories. We, as institutions, must position ourselves in this context and recognize that by doing so, and considering the private and corporate repositories that already exist, there are opportunities and also threats.
We must figure out the intellectual property issues around open software. We can learn from the private sector and organizations like the Open Source Initiative. Reflecting on institutions and their handling of data and data sharing requirements, he sees institutions trying to figure out how to open their data and believes we can do better, particularly as it relates to coordinated responses across universities.
Finally, Choudhury reflected on the balance between and among academic freedom, reproducibility, open scholarship, risk management, and technology transfer. We need to understand that university administration, TTOs, research projects administrators, and others think about risks in sharing research outputs. Choudhury envisions an institutional Venn diagram where one looks at risk alongside open scholarship benefits and academic freedom to find a sweet spot for action. Different institutions might have specific contexts or requirements (e.g., public or private university), but as a community, we can come together and work proactively to inform the OSTP, e.g., about how we wish to share software.
Choudhury also noted the difference between technology transfer, knowledge transfer, and innovation. Technology transfer typically involves commercialization that benefits an individual university. Knowledge transfer refers to translation or dissemination of open scholarship without commercialization, typically associated with the social sciences and humanities. Innovation refers to translation or dissemination that features new forms of social impact and partnerships (e.g., community centers) and national or global impact (e.g., university outputs licensed to help the US government rebuild manufacturing capacity).
Choudhury concluded with two invitations: 1) an invitation to join an OSPO++ webinar to learn more about institutional OSPOs, and 2) an invitation to join a working group focused on the big questions around open source software and knowledge transfer.
Please contact Caitlin@orfg.org for more information on both invitations, as well as any other questions or thoughts you may have related to open source and commercialization.
Spotlight Series Recap: Data Stewardship and Data Sharing
On August 23rd, 2022, HELIOS Open convened higher education leaders to discuss their data stewardship policy efforts with members. Geeta Swamy, Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at the Duke University School of Medicine, Associate Vice President for Research, and HELIOS Open Strategic Lead moderated the session.
Sarah Nusser, Professor Emerita of Statistics and former Vice President for Research at Iowa State University (ISU)
Nusser described her role in establishing Iowa State's Data Sharing Task Force and as a collaborator with the AAU-APLU Accelerating Public Access to Research Data (APARD) initiative. When reflecting on APARD, Nusser described the importance of the the Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data in articulating a vision for implementing a data sharing policy and in providing recommended steps, processes, and case studies that help campuses understand different implementation options.
At ISU, Nusser knew she needed to engage her campus colleagues and offices that support research advancement, compliance, and data sharing services when beginning to develop their institutional data sharing policy. With ISU’s library dean and the chief information officer (CIO) on board, they established a task force to discover and represent not only the faculty researcher perspective, but also the various entities that are involved in data sharing efforts. The data sharing task force piloted initial components of the system, including a draft research data policy that was released as guidelines to researchers, a cross-office data submission process that connected compliance reviews with data sharing support for researchers, and a prototype data repository that enabled researchers to share their data after review (DataShare).
Nusser concluded by describing challenges the task force faced with establishing their system before the APARD Guide was published. While campus leaders were supportive of this effort, data transparency was not included as a priority on their campus messaging to faculty, as is now recommended by the Guide. The task force was also established without explicit resources, which meant that task force members could not devote the kind of time needed to move quickly. Nusser also noted that the task force did not do a formal inventory of campus resources and discovered potential partners in other campus units late in their process that might have been helpful to the project.
In her concluding remarks, she reflected, “You can make policies, you can set up infrastructure, you can implement trainings and workflows, but sometimes the biggest barrier is navigating campus culture.” As researchers are embracing open science practices, it's becoming clearer what kind of planning and tool sets are useful to assist this adoption. Nusser recommended ensuring support for data sharing is present at the front end of a research project. Nusser also advocated for rethinking our reward system to value research transparency, including sharing data, code, and methodology. The National Academies Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Scholarship and HELIOS Open are big steps forward in this.
Nick Wigginton, Assistant Vice President for Research at University of Michigan
Just as the University of Michigan began assessing how to implement recommendations from a committee on public access to research data, three events slowed their work: 1) the COVID-19 pandemic began, shifting everyone’s attention to ensuring research continuity across the university, 2) the NIH announced they would soon be releasing a new data sharing policy, and 2) both the vice provost and provost, who initially charged the committee to work on a data sharing policy, transitioned from the institution, leaving the committee with little bandwidth to continue.
Wigginton indicated the APARD guidelines and the NIH requirements re-energized their policy work in 2021, and the committee began focusing on developing and implementing concrete steps to launch the U-M Research Data Stewardship Initiative. At the initiative's launch, they provided a website with guides, best practices, and frequently asked questions. While the NIH policy is a specific need to address in certain fields, they intentionally sought to be inclusive of all disciplines given broader expectations around data stewardship across other agencies.
The Research Data Stewardship Initiative, Wigginton described, established a multi-pronged approach to coalition building and education involving various campus units. Given the broad range of units that touch various elements of research data across a large research institution, the effort closely engages with the data service and research compliance communities, the CIO and General Counsel’s offices, the library, and schools and colleges. With this work, the committee encountered challenges inherent in coordinating across such a large institution: “There are probably hundreds of people across our institutions that think about data management every day; some work in service units to support faculty, some run disciplinary repositories, and some are faculty that are leading their disciplines and advising trainees.” Campus efforts like the Research Data Stewardship Initiative are focused on learning from one another and ensuring researchers are following the value and best practices around data that can improve the transparency, rigor, and impact of research.
In the future, the Initiative will host a series of webinars with leading edge researchers who have designed data or code sharing platforms or who study various aspects of data governance and sharing. This effort will support faculty-to-faculty learning about new and changing research practices, all with the goal of demonstrating the value of research data stewardship as the research landscape shifts.
HELIOS Open Analysis of New OSTP Guidance
On August 25, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum on Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research that significantly alters the open scholarship landscape.
The new policy guidance advances previous federal policy in a number of impactful ways:
Immediate access: The new guidance removes the previous 12-month embargo period on article sharing, and directs federal agencies to develop policies that would require access to publications “without any embargo or delay”. As the guidance affirms, such timely sharing is key to enabling the goals of open access, including accelerated scientific discovery. Importantly, the guidance would not require authors to publish in fully open access journals that may incur costs, but instead encourages sharing through “agency-designated repositories”.
Data sharing: The guidance directs federal agencies to update their policies on data sharing to enable immediate access to the data underlying published studies. In addition, it encourages agencies to think more expansively and “develop approaches and timelines” for the sharing of data not associated with publications. These are crucial steps for improving the verifiability, integrity, and reproducibility of federally funded research.
Broader focus: The definition of ‘publications’ is expanded to potentially cover not just journal articles, but also peer-reviewed book chapters, editorials, and conference proceedings. This represents an important recognition of the diversity of research outputs, especially across different disciplines, and could help incentivize broader scholarly communication.
Equity language: Centering equity as a guiding principle will encourage agencies to think about ways they can increase access to research without unintentionally raising additional barriers. Specifically, the guidance asks agencies to include in their plans, “How to maximize equitable reach of public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications” and to further “consider measures to reduce inequities in publishing of, and access to, federally funded research and data, especially among individuals from underserved backgrounds and those who are early in their careers.”
Research reusability: The guidance emphasizes the need for publications to be shared in both machine-readable formats and under terms that allow for “use and re-use rights”. The guidance also asks agencies to develop strategies to make “data, and other such research outputs and their metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-useable” (i.e., FAIR). This would permit researchers, citizen scientists, or industries to build on these shared outputs, as well as take advantage of emerging technologies, like content mining and artificial intelligence, to generate new knowledge.
Metadata and PIDs: The guidance calls for agencies to share publication metadata, including funding information, and to require the use of persistent identifiers (PIDs).
Timeliness: The guidance outlines a promising timeline that both requires agencies to update their policy plans relatively quickly but also gives them ample time to roll out the changes. Larger agencies are asked to update their policy plans within six months, publish the plans by the end of 2024, and then enact the new policy within one year (by end of 2025). Smaller agencies not subject to the 2013 memo will have a year to devise their initial plans.This timeline highlights the growing need to increase access to research sooner rather than later, especially in response to emerging global crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
Comprehensive coverage: Whereas the previous policy applied only to federal agencies with $100M+ in R&D expenditures, the new guidance applies to all U.S. federal agencies and departments – a jump from 20 to over 400 federal bodies. This will dramatically increase policy reach, and eventually the volume of research openly accessible and reusable.
This is a win for open scholarship and a validation of our “mutually reinforcing vectors” theory of change. We are encouraged that the language from the White House echoes the spirit of our own co-chair’s remarks from HELIOS Open’s kickoff event: “To promote equity and advance the work of restoring the public’s trust in government science, and to advance American scientific leadership, now is the time to amend federal policy to deliver immediate public access to federally funded research.” HELIOS Open has a tremendous opportunity to provide support, guidance, and incentives to help our researchers comply with this emerging policy. We look forward to exploring this work together with you. Stay tuned for more.
Resources:
June HELIOS Open Newsletter
A Note from our Strategic Lead
Dear Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship Members,
Open scholarship enables research transparency and integrity, facilitates scientific discovery, and promotes public health. It can also be a key driver in building public trust, agency, and engagement in the work we do as scholars, researchers, and scientists.
At Duke University, we have several initiatives advancing open scholarship practices and rewards at the institutional and departmental levels. These include open scholarship promotion and tenure guidelines in the Clinical Sciences; our Research Data Initiative, ensuring data integrity and fostering a culture of data sharing; and our Research Quality Management Program, a collaborative effort to implement best practices in research integrity and accountability
There is undoubtedly a great deal of open scholarship activity across the 78 (and growing) heterogeneous institutions that are HELIOS Open members. Some of it is strategic, organized by leadership to consciously improve research workflows and communication. Some of it is grassroots, driven by the 2.5 million faculty, staff, and students learning and working at these schools. What excites me most about HELIOS Open is the opportunity to learn from one another, to develop best practices and shared resources, and to bring more colleges and universities into this collaboration. By working together, we can effect a paradigm shift that advances open scholarship policies and practices. Together, we have the tremendous opportunity to develop and promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
— Geeta Swamy, Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at Duke University
HELIOS Open Launches with Focus on Collective Action
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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 Open)…
HELIOS Open Working Groups
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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.
Cross-Sector Alignment:
This working group will develop a set of “offers” – what HELIOS Open members, and the higher education community more generally, can bring to the cross-sector conversation with research funders, government agencies, societies, and industry to catalyze open scholarship. The group will also develop “asks” – what is needed from other groups to optimize and scale these efforts.
Shared Open Scholarship Infrastructure:
This working group will develop a “Guide for Research Infrastructure Decision-Making," which includes a concise set of questions and considerations to help campuses make informed choices about when to develop new infrastructure, adapt or adopt existing resources, and more. This guide could also be leveraged when applying for research funding.
Institutional & Departmental Policy Language:
This working group will develop language supporting open scholarship practices in hiring, annual reviews, and Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT). Participants will develop a roadmap that institutions can follow to socialize and adopt open scholarship-specific changes to RPT. A Commitment→Action→Accountability Framework will guide this work.
Open Scholarship in Focus
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HELIOS Open in the News:
New Initiative Incentivizes Open Research - The Scientist
Top-tier US universities push for open science - Times Higher Education
College and University Leaders Join Forces to Advance Open Science - Library Journal Info Docket
U.S academic leaders join forces for open scholarship - Research Information
Open Scholarship Events:
Open Work in Academia Summit - presented by Open@RIT and sponsored, in part, by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Ways to Engage
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Need HELIOS Open materials for an upcoming briefing or presentation? Have ideas for programming you’d like to suggest? Interested in joining another working group or connecting with another HELIOS Open institution? Contact Caitlin@orfg.org for help.
“HELIOS Open Newsletter” by the Open Research Funders Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
University of Maryland Department of Psychology Leads the Way in Aligning Open Science with Promotion & Tenure Guidelines
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.
The change was several years in the making and championed by Michael Dougherty, chair of the department. “When you think about the goal and purpose of higher education and why we take these positions, it’s because we felt there would be some good that we could impart on the world,” Dougherty said. “The traditional markers of impact are how many times you’ve been cited [in a journal]. That’s not the type of impact that is valuable to the broader society.”
The new policy was necessary, he said, so incentives for advancement reflect the values of scientists and their institutions.
“The land grant institution is really founded on giving back to the community what the community is investing in,” he said. “Making our work as accessible as possible, with as few barriers as possible, has to be a cornerstone component. You can’t conceive impact without access.”
Throughout his career, Dougherty has advocated for leveraging open practices to enhance scientific integrity. He uses the Open Science Framework for documenting and sharing data, and requires his students to use this platform as well. Once named department chair five years ago, Dougherty said he was committed to rewarding work that was made broadly available without barriers, but he recognized it would be a culture change that required time. He started by sharing information with his colleagues and talking about the main issues of transitioning to open science over two to three years.
On the College Park campus, Dougherty assembled a small working group of faculty members (an assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor) to join him in rewriting the review guidelines. The last time they were touched was 2006, so revisions were overdue, he said. Informed by the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and other resources, they started fresh — tossing out old criteria and redrafting the policy.
Dougherty co-authored an article in 2019 that underscored the importance of making research evaluation more transparent and in service to the public good. Soon after the piece was published, he connected with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science where he met like-minded scholars pushing for changes in the incentive structure.
“It gave me some hope,” Dougherty said of the group. “When the Roundtable was launched, we talked about accelerating change. The National Academies brings with it some cachet. If we can leverage that cachet to really do something that's going to institute change, we have a shot.”
Engaging with the Roundtable and, more recently, the Roundtable’s spin-off Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) was a chance to push for systemic change, Dougherty said. While there is often talk about a desire to transform the tenure and promotion process, it’s difficult for individual institutions to do alone. Since advancement has traditionally been tied to prestige of journal publication, ushering in a new approach involved many scholars acting together, he said.
It’s difficult for an institution to make a policy change when there is uncertainty whether peers, colleagues and funders outside the institution share the same values. “The institution is still too small of a unit for the changes to be able to cascade into everyone’s behavior,” said Juan Pablo Alperin, associate professor in the publishing program at Simon Fraser University in Canada who has studied the issue.
Between 2017 and 2022, Alperin and the Open Research Funders Group’s Eric McKiernan were among the scholars who conducted a multi-year research project analyzing more than 850 review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) guidelines and 338 surveys, with scholars from 129 research institutions across Canada and the United States. They found that academics perceive others to care more about prestige than they do themselves, suggesting an appetite for a shift in evaluation criteria—if a transformation could be coordinated.
Alperin said the new guidelines at UMD and elsewhere are encouraging and create momentum.
“We learned from our research that these guidelines create a signal–asserting values by departments and institutions that can be effective,” said Alperin. “As more institutions make this explicit in their guidelines, that starts to create the conversations needed for a widespread desire for change.”
The UMD department of psychology document begins with a statement of overarching principles that lay the groundwork for what the new approach was trying to accomplish.
The evaluative criteria includes a commitment to providing equitable access to scholarly articles through open access publications and preprint servers (in accordance with UMD’s Equitable Access policy). The department now places a premium on team science and embraces diverse approaches to scholarship. It acknowledges the difficulty doing work with hard-to-reach populations and the importance of community engaged work and open science. The guidelines also draw explicitly from the Roundtable’s Toolkit for Fostering Open Science Practices in the evaluative criteria used in merit review.
There were multiple faculty meetings that included group editing of the guidelines before they were adopted in the spring of 2022.
“The level of faculty engagement was really healthy,” Dougherty said. “By the time we were finalizing it, people had bought into it. They knew what the right thing to do was. It was not a hard sell.”
For other institutions considering adopting new evaluation guidelines, Dougherty suggests the key is reframing impact as accessibility. The new approach is a way to empower people to do the research they want to do, he said, and translates into scholars feeling their work is meaningful.
Geeta Swamy, Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity at Duke University and HELIOS Open strategic lead, praised the UMD psychology department’s approach as a model that other institutions can replicate. “A core part of the HELIOS Open collaboration is identifying real-world solutions that can effectively move the needle toward open scholarship, then working to tailor and scale them across scores of institutions. Our Institutional & Departmental Policy Language Working Group is keen to leverage and amplify Maryland’s work.”
Adds Dougherty: “When I think about what it is that we need to do as scientists to really solve the world's problems, it's all hands on deck. And in order for that to happen, we have to be able to make our research products, not just the articles, but the data, the analysis, code, everything available.”
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Posted in collaboration with SPARC
HELIOS Open 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 Open). HELIOS Open 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.
In their opening remarks, each HELIOS Open co-chair emphasized the importance of coordinated, scalable activities in support of open scholarship. Speaking of HELIOS Open’s potential, Arizona State University President Michael Crow described facilitating “movement toward modern scholarship-based science that is [as] wildly open as it was in pre-scholarship modality, with more cultural awareness, cultural engagement, and intergenerational communication and understanding across various elements of our broadly scoped societies.”
Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels emphasized the role higher education plays in advancing open values: “Colleges and universities are one of the most vital fact generating and fact checking institutions within democratic society. One of their core obligations is to share facts with the public and inform the creation of sound policy, and to check the claims of those who are in power. The more that we can share facts and ideas beyond our walls, the more we can prove our worth to the democratic project and improve the lives of those who stand to benefit the most from the work that we're doing.”
In her remarks, Benedict College President Roslyn Artis stressed the importance of open scholarship as the head of an historically black liberal arts college: “Institutions large and small, with a diversity of ideas, research capacity, and acumen, have something to contribute — within disciplines; across disciplines; and in research teams across institutions, states and regions—to create collaborative solutions to complex problems. The ability to collaborate more effectively, across institutions, is stimulated by open research.”
Geeta Swamy, HELIOS Open’s Strategic Lead and Duke University Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity, then provided an open scholarship case study in the form of Duke’s Research Data Initiative, which serves as a central hub for campus open data and research activities. “Open science can be key in gaining the public's trust and appropriately stewarding the work that they are entrusting us to do. Making research open allows people to see our work and contributes to the culture of research integrity.”
In pre-meeting survey responses and during meeting breakouts, HELIOS Open participants expressed interest in forming working groups focused on the following key areas:
Drafting guidance for students and faculty to clearly and succinctly articulate good practices for sharing specific forms of open scholarship (e.g., papers, data).
Engaging with other key stakeholders (e.g., government agencies, philanthropies, professional societies, publishers) to align open scholarship policies and incentives.
Collaborating with other institutions on shared resourcing and infrastructure.
Identifying policy language that can be adapted and adopted by departments on our campus, and/or across the entirety of the institution.
HELIOS Open members will convene over the coming months to begin scoping priorities and developing testable recommendations. These efforts will inform the next HELIOS Open member meeting, which will be held in late fall. Where possible, HELIOS Open activities will build upon the wealth of tools, case studies, and other resources that have been developed across member institutions and the broader research ecosystem, developing complementary outputs as appropriate.
During the meeting, Greg Tananbaum Director of the Open Research Funders Group and liaison between HELIOS Open and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, noted that the scope and tenor of HELIOS Open interventions will vary across the membership: “Success will look different for different members. We aren’t all starting at the same place and we won’t all end up in the same place. This is a feature not a bug. The purpose of HELIOS Open is not to lay down lines in the sand. It’s to encourage each member to take steps that are appropriate for their specific community.”
President Daniels added, “I’m excited about the work that lies ahead for this group. It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to exchange ideas, share best practices, and take action together as a coalition of the willing. If we can help move the entire academic research enterprise toward greater openness, we can make our research and our democracy stronger and better. I know this is a big and lofty charge, but I think it's one that's worth pursuing. The stakes are simply too high not to.”
The project is supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Templeton World Charity Foundation. Institutions interested in joining HELIOS Open should contact caitlin@orfg.org for more information.
College and University Leaders Join Forces to Advance Open Scholarship
Bold collaboration to improve research accessibility and inclusivity
March 22, 2022 — In a push to make scholarly outputs more transparent and beneficial to a broader community, leaders from a diverse array of 65 U.S. colleges and universities are joining forces to advance the principles and practices of open scholarship. The partnership will ensure that as many students, faculty, practitioners, policy makers, and community members as possible have access to, and a voice in, research and scholarship.
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship, known as HELIOS Open, is a cohort of colleges and universities formed to create collective action to advance open scholarship across their campuses. HELIOS Open takes place within the larger context of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science.
“HELIOS Open represents the most promising, ambitious attempt to align higher education practices with open scholarship values,” said Greg Tananbaum, secretariat of the National Academies’ Roundtable and Director of Open Research Funders Group, a network of funders committed to the open sharing of research outputs. “Colleges and universities can make it easier and more rewarding for students, faculty, and staff to engage in open scholarship activities like data sharing and self-archiving their papers. HELIOS Open is an important collective step in that direction.”
HELIOS Open members have agreed to commit a high-level presidential representative to work with other institutions to develop actionable incentives, resources, and infrastructure that broadens access to research and scholarship. Leaders will also work with relevant units on their campuses to champion open scholarship policies and programs and to support internal stakeholders in establishing appropriate milestones, communications channels, infrastructure, supports, resources, and accountability mechanisms. HELIOS Open members will meet regularly as a community of practice to identify areas of shared interest and possible collaboration, to discuss success and challenges, and to develop guidance for other institutions.
“We believe HELIOS Open will accelerate the adoption of open scholarship by engaging senior leaders across higher education to collaborate on areas of shared interest such as hiring, training, and tenure practices,” said Geeta Swamy, the Strategic Lead for HELIOS Open and Duke University Associate Vice President for Research and Vice Dean for Scientific Integrity. “Collective action and ongoing dialog can help identify best practices, as well as areas ripe for institutional cooperation.”
HELIOS Open is co-chaired by Arizona State University President Michael Crow, Benedict College President Roslyn Artis, and Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels. Tananbaum and HELIOS Open Program Manager Caitlin Carter provide operational support. HELIOS Open is generously supported by grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and Templeton World Charity Foundation
HELIOS Open members meet in late March to kick off the work. Learn more about HELIOS Open and find a full list of members at heliosopen.org.
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