Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship

"HELIOS emerges from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. This multi-year project brings together key stakeholders -- including senior leadership at universities, federal agencies, philanthropies, international bodies, and other strategic organizations -- to rethink research evaluation to better incentivize and reward openness and transparency. As part of this work, a Roundtable workshop introduced an open science toolkit – a set of resources that can help key stakeholders “discuss, develop, and deploy open scholarship incentivization plans (e.g., academic hiring, tenure and promotion, and grants) that are both consistent with common norms and appropriate for their specific communities.” Higher education leaders who are Roundtable members leveraged the toolkit to issue a “dear colleague” letter to their peers in mid-2021, along with a succinct Guide to Supporting Open Scholarship for University Presidents and Provosts. The letter included a clear call to action: “Now is the time for colleges and universities to support open scholarship, sharing research results of all kinds openly as early as practical.” A fall 2021 virtual meeting drew participants from dozens of institutions and confirmed a collective will to answer this call. The Roundtable is facilitating the HELIOS cohort to ensure that as many students, faculty, practitioners, policy makers, and community members as possible have access to, and a voice in, research and scholarship...."