Preliminary Findings from the Review, Promotion, and Tenure Study – scholcommlab

"Support for the open access movement has grown in recent years, and today more than a quarter of scholarly literature is freely available. Yet, despite years of advocacy work and countless policies and mandates promoting openness, the majority of researchers are still not compelled to make their research outputs publicly available. Why is this the case? What barriers stand in the way of creating real change? In a study by the ScholCommLab, Juan Pablo Alperin, Carol Muñoz Nieves, Lesley Schimanski, Erin McKiernan, and Meredith Niles suggest one possible explanation: the state of the review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) protocols at today’s research institutions. These documents, which are meant to provide faculty with the guidelines needed to achieve career success, are among the key incentive structures that drive their research dissemination strategies. But as the team’s findings reveal, surprisingly few of them mention open access at all—and even fewer provide the tools needed to pursue it. In this interview, the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Alperin, shares some of the preliminary results and what they could mean for the future of scholarly research.

Tell me a bit about the study. What did you investigate and where are you at now?  

We’ve recently finished the first phase of the research: we collected more than 850 RPT guidelines from colleges and universities across the United States and Canada and assessed the degree to which they included guidelines specific to open access, research metrics, and forms of research dissemination. Basically, we found that only about 5% of the institutions studied made explicit mention of open access in their guidelines, and, in several of those few cases, the mention was done to call attention to the potential problematic nature of these journals, which are sometimes incorrectly seen as being of lower quality than subscription journals. We have submitted a comprehensive literature review of these issues for publication, and are about to submit another manuscript with these and other results. While we wait for these to come out, we have published the dataset containing the analysis of terms and concepts. We’ve also started a second phase in which we will survey faculty at each of the institutions in our study to find out more about their perceptions of the guidelines and how they use them to inform their work...."