Professional Benefits/P&T

In order for open access to be fully integrated into academic life, it needs to be valued as part of the promotion and tenure process. There is growing support of open access items among colleges and universities, scholarly societies, and funding agencies. Represented below are some policies and procedures for why and how OA is important for faculty publishing and the P+T process.  

First, you should take a few minutes to read the Open Access book by Peter Suber: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access which describes the full OA and scholarly communication landscape and helps to assuage common misunderstandings about OA.

Then look at the specific language crafted for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and how they see OA and why it is relevant to their academic affairs:

• IUPUI is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarly activities as widely as possible and as such supports faculty participating in digital open access distribution of their scholarship. The IUPUI Open Access Policy provides a no-cost, opt out approach to increase access to scholarly articles authored by campus faculty members.
• Open access supports many of IUPUI’s Institutional Values including: Civic Engagement; Collaboration; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Economic Development; Interdisciplinary Work and Publication; International Work and Publication; Public Scholars; and Translational Research.3

This post details how open access research is playing an increasingly role in promotion and tenure at a variety of institutions, and highlights some success stories.

The Modern Language Association has a report on Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.

SPARC has identified P+T reform as a 2016 priority: Tenure and Promotion Reform. A new priority for SPARC will be to promote the consideration of “Open” articles, data and educational resources in the evaluation, tenure and promotion process by:

• Creating educational opportunities to promote the inclusion of “Open” behaviors in evaluation, tenure and promotion guidelines and checklists.
• Promoting exemplars—campuses that have already successfully taken this step.
• Identifying supportive Campus leaders
• Identifying supportive student and ECR leaders.
• Convening stakeholders for peer-to-peer discussion of strategy to promote wider adoption of practices/policies rewarding open sharing of research outputs and educational resources.
• Creating and presenting webcasts/public programming supporting this kind of reform.

The CCCC details how the shift from print to electronic scholarly publishing as part of the P+T process. Originally published in 1998, it has been revised in 2015, and includes language on openness and accessibility.

But what about the “pay to publish anything method”, also known as predatory publishing?