Open Access Week keynote to explore alignment of open science principles with promotion and tenure guidelines

KU Libraries will celebrate International Open Access Week with an event at 11 a.m., Tuesday, Oct. 21, in Watson Library 3 West, featuring keynote speaker Michael Dougherty, professor of psychology at the University of Maryland.  

Tailored toward faculty, departmental chairs, and administrators, Dougherty’s talk, “Aligning incentives with institutional values: Reforming faculty evaluation to promote (and reward) scholarship for the public good,” will explore how structures like promotion and tenure are frequently cited as barriers to embracing open practices, and suggest pathways toward enabling broader participation.  

A hands-on workshop intended for faculty, department chairs, and administrators will follow the talk at 2 p.m. The workshop is free, but please register in advance to attend. The keynote presentation at 11 a.m. is open to all, no registration required.  

Dougherty, as chair of his department, collaborated with colleagues to usher in policy reform and new departmental guidelines aligning promotion and tenure standards with open access and open science practices.  

"It's really getting back to the roots of what it means to be a member of the higher education community and the obligations that come along with that, to steward scholarship, to steward science in the public interest,” Dougherty said. “What we’re doing with the open access movement is saying our work is for public consumption and I, as a scientist, have an obligation to make my work available and accessible to the general public. That means we need rethink what we’re incentivizing within our promotion and tenure systems.” 

Dougherty said many promotion and tenure systems contain references to the public or community, but those efforts tend to be put into a service category that is not emphasized within the process. In the current culture, there are rarely explicit incentives to give back to the community, something Dougherty’s talk will address, offering strategies and insights to promote change.  

The Open Access Week event will also mark 20 years of KU ScholarWorks, an institutional repository featuring scholarly work by KU faculty, staff and students, and celebrate campus efforts to advance open sharing with the announcement of the 2025 Shulenburger Award for Innovation and Advocacy in Scholarly Communications. Presented yearly by KU Libraries’ Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright and the KU Libraries Dean, the award aims to encourage, honor, and spur additional advocacy for open access efforts.  

Dougherty said library partnerships are central to making change in the open access movement.  

“Librarians are on the front lines of all of this work. It just doesn’t happen without the important role of the libraries,” he said. “Key individuals who are advancing scholarship, education, openness and transparency -- it’s the libraries that do that.” 

In 2009, KU became the first public university in the nation to adopt an open access policy, and KU Libraries continue to build on a history of leadership related to openness. The libraries’ Open Education Resources save KU students an estimated $1.45 million each year. KU Libraries support open publishing opportunities, invest in open initiatives, and advocate for open educational resources (OER), in addition to managing ScholarWorks, which recently surpassed 30,000 items and saw more than 2.5 million downloads in calendar year 2024. 

More information and connection to resources can be found at KU's Open Access website.