UNIVERSITY PERSPECTIVES

During this session, speakers provided a university perspective related to fostering open science practices.

Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (ASU), opened the session, providing his experience as president of the university and as deputy provost and chief research officer at Columbia University. During his time in these positions, he noted that communicating about science, particularly with the public, has been a significant challenge, slowing progress in advancing open science.

One of the challenges in the movement toward open science has been the bureaucratic nature of academia, noted Crow. “We will never have open science at the level that we need … until we have open organizational structures and open organizational design,” he stated, adding that open science is the tool needed to support exploration and innovation.

However, there are examples of successful moves toward open science in academia. He cited ASU’s new School of Sustainability, which connects a wide range of topics and supports open science. ASU has 600 faculty members involved in initiatives connecting supply chain dynamics to computational assessment, biology, and complexity theory, all working together to address critical challenges and share data and resources.

Crow added that university administration needs to understand that openness is more than just the “opening up” of scientific trajectory and that it includes the broadening of scientific perspectives, theoretical outcomes, and new theories and practices. It is also the broadening of the notion of the understanding of science by the entire population. What is needed, he said, is the bold redesign of universities and scientific enterprises; these need to open to break down barriers. This shift, which is particularly critical at the leadership level, may also require broadening of funding sources to more nontraditional funders.

Philip Bourne, founding dean of the University of Virginia School of Data Science, described the need for more flexibility among organizational types to achieve open science, noting three entry points (bottom up, middle, and top down) that offer opportunities to change and align incentives for these efforts.

Describing a bottom-up approach, Bourne discussed his work with a biological database, the Protein Data Bank, run by scientists who created a culture and strong incentives to move toward open data sharing. In an example of a middle-ground approach, Bourne discussed his work with the Public Library of Science, or PLOS, a nonprofit open access science, technology, and medicine publisher with a portfolio of open access journals and other content. The organization’s incentives for openness included an interest in working with prestigious journals as well as an interest in and desire to be part of contributing to the movement toward open science. Bourne’s work with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided an example of a top-down model such as the NIH FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets) data-sharing policy and the policy on preprints. While there are many opportunities to make an impact in open science, he said, change comes slowly.

Bourne noted that there are points of entry for each of the bottom-up, middle, and top-down organizational structures to support open science. For example, he noted that in hiring faculty, universities should work to develop the culture from the ground up, examining how promotion and tenure policies and the faculty handbook can support this culture of openness. In terms of middle-ground incentives, these can come about through partnerships that support open science. Partnerships with libraries are critical to this movement.

Regarding top-down initiatives, Bourne noted that the president, provost, and the chief operating officer of the University of Virginia were involved in the development of a new strategic plan for the institution that supported a movement toward openness. This resulted in an improvement in the visibility of research that comes from open science and data sharing. He added that the main incentive in moving the cultural needle on this issue is partnerships and working with other teams across schools. Stakeholders at all levels within the community need to be engaged in developing a culture of openness—from students through university presidents.

Tatiana Bryant, research librarian for digital humanities, history, and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, described a current research project in collaboration with Camille Thomas, scholarly communications librarian at Florida State University, to examine Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) faculties’ experience with open access, including what, if any, institutional and disciplinary support these faculties have received in this area.

Bryant said she and Thomas had planned to attend conferences to convene focus groups across a range of disciplines but had to pivot to online focus groups due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in eight rounds of focus groups of about 40 participants. Several factors, including difficulty recruiting faculty during the summer months and the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on BIPOC, made recruiting difficult. Given these challenges, a majority of faculty who have participated in the focus groups represent humanities and social science disciplines, rather than science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.

While the study is ongoing, some preliminary data have been collected, stated Thomas. These indicate the need to address barriers to open science at their source. Participants also noted that institutions or departments with a social justice mission appeared to be more encouraging of open science practices. Being considered contingent labor along with the risk of not receiving promotion and tenure were identified as barriers. For example, several participants noted that they were postdocs prior to their current faculty positions; open science initiatives were not available to them as postdocs. Additionally, Thomas noted that initial results indicated that BIPOC faculty tended to be excluded from collaborative networks that received grant funding, particularly federal grant funding, where policies were supportive of open science practices.

Thomas added that universities could further support BIPOC faculty in open science efforts by publishing policies, mandates, and expectations in institutions as well as offering startup and research funds for article processing charges at the individual and faculty level. However, she noted that participants described concerns about predatory publishing, including the need to consider journal quality to address these concerns. Finally, Thomas noted that offering seed money for new projects and open access should be weighted as a part of the application process.

DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

During this session, speakers provided a disciplinary perspective related to adopting and utilizing a toolkit to promote open science.

Lauren Collister, chair of the Committee on Scholarly Communication in Linguistics of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), began by providing an overview of open scholarship in linguistics, including current efforts by the LSA related to open science. The field is strongly aligned with open science; sharing coded data, problem sets, and publications is a norm in the field, although it is not always necessarily articulated as open science or open scholarship. With a strong foundation in openness, linguists share knowledge, training, and tools, including, for example, through the LSA’s hub as well as at its annual meetings and training seminars. These tools and resources can be used by scholars to advocate for the open practices that underlie their work. The LSA also provides support on how to develop, manage, and openly share data.

The LSA has developed a statement on the evaluation of language documentation for hiring, promotion, and tenure.¹ Department chairs have used this statement as a lever to change practices and incentives for tenure and promotion in their universities. Another statement currently in draft form, developed by the LSA’s Committee on Scholarly Communication in Linguistics, addresses the scholarly merit and evaluation of open scholarship.²

Collister described how the LSA has worked to move toward open journal publishing, while considering the financial impact this has had on the society. The society has been using a hybrid/delayed open access model for its flagship journal, which has other fully subsidized open access publications. While open access publishing is important, it does not have to be the sole focus of a society’s work in moving toward open science. Societies have the power to drive change for a discipline; they can use that power to elevate open scholarship, stated Collister (see Figure 2-1). The Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science’s toolkit along with other published guidance on signaling language can support a shift toward openness. Embracing openness and the need for culture change is essential to moving forward, she added.

FIGURE 2-1

Open research life cycle. SOURCE: Lauren Collister, presentation, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, November 5, 2020, based on www.fosteropenscience.eu.

Sanjay Srivastava, professor and undergraduate education chair of the University of Oregon Department of Psychology, began by noting that the movement toward openness in psychology was initially motivated by concerns about the inability to replicate research; lack of transparency in research methods made it difficult to fully evaluate the evidence. However, the field has long been engaged in open scholarship to address these issues. The University of Oregon, for example, has been incorporating open science into its teaching, both in graduate seminars and in undergraduate classes.

Several years ago, the psychology department at the University of Oregon began incorporating open science principles into its hiring practices, Srivastava said. The department, in an effort to signal the importance of openness to its candidates and faculty, incorporated the following language, adapted from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the 2016 conference of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, into its job advertisements: “Our department embraces the values of open and reproducible science, and candidates are strongly encouraged to address in their statements how they have pursued and/or plan to pursue these goals in their work.” This has encouraged applicants to discuss their interest and experience with open science in their research statements or cover letters. Srivastava added that the department has also had a strong emphasis on inclusion. As the department works to diversify and expand, the goal is to hire broadly to represent the field.

More recently, the department has been working to develop guidance for incorporating openness into tenure and promotion activities. The department held workshops for tenure-track, non-tenure-track, and early-career faculty to identify priorities, valuing, in particular, the early-career perspective. Participants discussed the importance of expanding research outputs beyond papers and publications to address open science. Developing research philosophy statements to incorporate open science was also discussed. Other initiatives include encouraging candidates to nominate a set of representative papers for review. To support this process, external referees would be provided guidance about how to evaluate these papers and consider the candidate’s work through this lens.

RESEARCH FUNDER PERSPECTIVES

Speakers during this session provided a research funder’s perspective related to increasing open science activities.

Ekemini Riley, managing director of Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP), described the organization’s work to accelerate the pace of discovery for Parkinson’s disease specifically and neurodegeneration broadly. ASAP’s collaborative research network, one of the organization’s key funding initiatives, brings together multiple disciplines, institutions, career stages, and geographies, while aiming to foster collaboration across teams early in the research process. Open science and research transparency are key requirements in receiving funding from ASAP, Riley noted. Funded researchers must agree to the following terms:

• Share new results on the ASAP Hub (virtual platform)
• Post experimental protocols to a protocol-sharing service, such as protocols.io
• Deposit tools (and code) through accessible repositories once the tool has been characterized and validated through the funded study
• Submit manuscripts to a preprint server, such as bioRxiv, before or concurrent to the first submission to a journal
• Publish finished work in a journal that offers immediate open access with a Creative Commons CC BY license

The research network now spans 11 countries. Those on the research team, from principal investigators to graduate students, can view funded proposals that are posted on the research hub, serving as a point for research collaboration.

A movement toward open science policies and practices requires an intentional culture change, including team-centric approaches and data sharing early and often, stated Riley. To achieve results in this area, there is a need for a constellation of open science mechanisms and opportunities for virtual collaboration.

Julia Stewart Lowndes, senior fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founder of Openscapes, began by noting that data analysis is a critical area to focus efforts to expand open science. Current approaches for data analysis are closed and individualized; however, open data science changes this perspective by offering collaborative and empowering opportunities for researchers. Open science is also a powerful tool to embrace diversity and inclusivity.

Lowndes described the Ocean Health Index,³ a program designed to measure ocean health from a global to local scale at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A 2017 publication summarized the program’s efforts to move toward open data science approaches (Lowndes et al., 2017); new skillsets and mindsets were essential to this effort. Open science was identified as a means to meet analytical needs to develop the program. The Ocean Health Index, now used globally, for example, by the United Nations, has demonstrated the ability to reimagine public engagement and science communication through its open access to code, data, and publishing.

Lowndes discussed efforts by Openscapes to help researchers practice open science, by approaching open science as (1) a spectrum, with many entryways to meet researchers where they are; (2) a behavior change, requiring new skillsets and mindsets; and (3) a movement, where empowering leaders and champions is valued along with individual skills.⁴ She then described the Openscapes Champions mentorship program offered to research teams. It is a remote-by-design and cohort-based program, enabling community building across research teams and universities (Lowndes, 2019). This program helps to address an unmet need to support research teams through training and mentorship, she said; support for open leaders who are trainers and mentors is also needed.

Lowndes cited a framework developed by the Center for Open Science on how to support a cultural shift toward open science (see Figure 2-2). As a research community, Lowndes said we have made progress to make open science possible, easy, rewarding, and required, in some cases, as part of our fundamental processes. Now, she added, we need to support researchers to make it normative, which requires investing in human infrastructure. This can include sponsoring research teams to be trained and mentored. Researchers can attend hack weeks and meetups and can participate in workshops and as Openscapes champions.

FIGURE 2-2

Changing a research culture. SOURCE: Julia Stewart Lowndes, presentation, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, November 5, 2020, based on Brian Nosek, Center for Open Science.

In addition, Lowndes said, there is a need for salaried positions for open leaders to train and mentor research teams. Trainers, mentors, research software engineers, and community managers who participate in this work are often early-career academics supported by “soft money.” Increasing the number of salaried positions in this area would allow for increased continuity in these roles and would reduce burnout. Open leaders engaged in this work are doing this without support and many leave academia as a result, ultimately slowing the progress toward open science. Lowndes noted that open leaders do jobs that are not currently valued in academia, and yet they are critical to normalizing open science and making progress in this area.