Professors want to share: preliminary survey results on establishing open-source-endowed professorships

Abstract

This study proposes a novel policy to provide incentives for open science: to offer open-source (OS)-endowed professorships. To hold an open-source-endowed chair , in addition to demonstrated excellence in their field, professors would need to agree to (1) ensuring all of their writing is distributed via open access in some way and (2) releasing all of their intellectual property in the public domain or under appropriate open-source licenses. The results of this survey study of university professors in the U.S. show that a super majority (86.7%) of faculty respondents indicated willingness to accept an OS-endowed professorship, while only 13.3% of respondents would not be willing to accept the terms of an OS-endowed professorship. The terms of accepting an OS-endowed professorship that were the most popular among respondents were increased salary, annual discretionary budget, as a term of tenure and annual RA or TA lines. More than a quarter of responding professors declared that no additional compensation would be needed for them to accept the terms of an OS-endowed professorship. The results demonstrate a clear willingness of academics to expand open access to science, which would hasten scientific progress while also making science more just and inclusive. It is clear that science funders have a large opportunity to move towards open science by offering open–source-endowed chairs.

Free and Open-Source Automated Open Access Preprint Harvesting

“…There is also widespread interest in vastly expanding transparency in all aspects of the scientific knowledge-generating process (European Commission, 2015). Furthermore, recent research has shown a clear willingness of academics to expand OA, which would hasten scientific progress while also making science more just and inclusive (Pearce et al, 2022a(Pearce et al, , 2022b. The results of this article indicate that functionally doing this would not be prohibitively expensive or time consuming for the past literature and would provide a legal means to provide the same level of access that Sci-Hub provides illegally (Bohannon, 2016).…”

Open science interventions proposed or implemented to assess researcher impact: a scoping review

“…Most of the publications were indicated as research culture, perspective, commentary, essay, proceedings of a workshop, research article, world view, opinion, research note, editorial, report, and research policy (n = 22). Only three records 19,31,33 in our scoping review were empirical research. The majority of the records did not report any funding information (n = 15), but of those that mentioned if they had received funding, seven records (47%) reported receiving funding, and similarly six records (53%) reported receiving no funding.…”