New white paper asks, “How can we reform promotion and tenure practices to promote open access?”

George Mason University Press and the Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) have just published the OSI 2017 Promotion & Tenure Reform Workgroup Report, which explores how professional advancement scenarios–promotion and tenure, grant applications, and so on–might be reimagined to better incentivize open access, open data, and other “open” scholarly practices.

My coauthors and I explored current systemic barriers to change, and propose concrete steps that OSI organizers can take to further study those challenges and find solutions.

The white paper is the result of the “Promotion and Tenure Reform” working group that convened at OSI 2017 in Washington DC, which included:

• Me (Stacy Konkiel, Altmetric)
• Cheryl Ball, West Virginia University
• Kim Barrett, University of California San Diego and the Journal of Physiology
• Peter Berkery, Association of American University Presses
• Jessica Clemons, University of Buffalo
• Sheree Crosby, Cabell’s International
• Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski, Elsevier and Northwestern University

To read the white paper, please visit GMU Press’s website.

Stacy Konkiel is Director of Research & Education at Altmetric, a data science company that helps researchers discover the attention their work receives online. Since 2008, she has worked at the intersection of Open Science, research impact metrics, and academic library services with teams at Impactstory, Indiana University & PLOS.