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

Abstract

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. Although it should be pointed out that more than a quarter of respondents would require no additional compensation. 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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.