Abstract
The remit of the Open Scholarship Initiative 2017 Promotion & Tenure Reform workgroup clearly connected researchers’ personal publishing choices to the oft-traditionalist system of promotion and tenure in the United States, wherein researchers feel compelled to publish in toll access journals or monographs if they wish to achieve tenure, win grants, receive awards, or otherwise advance professionally. Other professional advancement systems worldwide, such as university hiring, contract renewals and government and foundation grantmaking processes similarly reinforce the primacy of toll access research formats. Hiring practices were of concern for our workgroup, given the increasing “adjunctification” and precarious state of tenured university posts in the United States. Due to these parallels, the Reform working group expanded our charge to consider hiring, grants, and other professional advancement scenarios common to researchers’ concerns worldwide.In this report, we unpack how professional advancement practices—including and beyond promotion and tenure review standards—can be realigned to encourage researchers’ adoption of open access (OA), open research, and open educational practices.Here, we set the scope of the current problem, discuss the reasons why professional advancement scenarios should be realigned to reward open research practices, identify challenges to reforming professional advancement scenarios wholesale and worldwide, recommend concrete actions for beginning the reformation process, and share resources related to professional advancement and open access.
Highlights
The remit of the Open Scholarship Initiative 2017 Promotion & Tenure Reform workgroup clearly connected researchers’ personal publishing choices to the oft-traditionalist system of promotion and tenure in the United States, wherein researchers feel compelled to publish in toll access journals or monographs if they wish to achieve tenure, win grants, receive awards, or otherwise advance professionally
Other professional advancement systems worldwide, such as university hiring, contract renewals and government and foundation grantmaking processes reinforce the primacy of toll access research formats
Hiring practices were of concern for our workgroup, given the increasing “adjunctification” and precarious state of tenured university posts in the United States
Summary
The workgroup initially grappled with the scope of the assigned problem. We were asked to develop a “widely-accepted and inclusive model....to help reduce the influence of journal publishing on promotion and tenure decisions and help make these decisions broader, more transparent, and less reliant on publishing and impact factor measures.” To a greater or lesser degree, not all workgroup members agreed with the underlying premise of this assignment as stated. We must be mindful that the issues inherent in infusing a culture of openness into academic advancement scenarios are likely highly dependent on discipline and culture, and some gains will be easier to achieve than others This issue extends well beyond journal articles and/or STEM fields and the impact factors that almost exclusively apply in these settings, and yet it may be far more challenging to implement principles of openness in promotion and tenure practices for faculty in traditional “book disciplines” (i.e. the humanities and social sciences). Open funders can create transparency in the evaluation process, freely sharing the guidelines used to evaluate funding proposals, encouraging researchers to share their grant proposals (both accepted and rejected), and (where appropriate) releasing more information on the review process used by their committees These various examples boil down to two main facets of openness: openness in expectations and evaluation practices, and openness in the production of research
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