University of New Mexico just missed an opportunity to be ahead of the curve

“Steve Koch, one of the most active practitioners of open science, announced today that he has not been awarded tenure, despite the considerable support he had received from the global open science community. Steve Koch, one of the most active practitioners of open science, announced today that he has not been awarded tenure, despite the considerable support he had received from the global open science community. He accompanied his announcement with an open letter (WebCite) to the faculty that had rejected his tenure application, referring to the well-known (and typically unaddressed, at least by the powers-to-be) problem that the only thing that counts for career advancement in science are formal peer-reviewed publications. Incidentally, this was also the main reason why Paul Ginsparg – the founder of the arXiv – had to leave Los Alamos, which prompted the comment that ‘Evidently their form didn’t have a box for: ‘completely transformed the nature and reach of scientific information in physics and other fields’. Steven has not reached that stage yet but he was on a good track to transform the teaching of Physics by doing it in the open. In conclusion, Steve wrote I’m not done trying to improve science and maximize the impact of our taxpayers’ research and higher education funding... and Bill Hooker commented ‘UNM has missed an opportunity to be ahead of the curve.’ Below, I am pasting in a copy of his letter (with one typo corrected) and a copy of the letter that the global open science community had prepared in support of his application for tenure. Both documents have been released under CC0/ Public Domain.”