American Institute of Biological Sciences Joins Alliance for Open Scholarship
The Alliance for Open Scholarship (All4OS) is pleased to welcome its newest member, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS). Comprised of 108 diverse member organizations, AIBS is dedicated to promoting the use of science to inform decision-making and advancing biology for the benefit of science and society. "We firmly believe that science is strengthened by the open exchange of diverse perspectives and ideas," said AIBS CEO Scott Glisson. "Open research and scholarship practices are critical for improving scientific rigor, integrity, and transparency, and will move us closer to our goal of enhancing inclusion, diversity, equity, acceptance, and accessibility."
All4OS is pleased to collaborate with AIBS and our coalition of societies and associations working to identify, articulate, and socialize appropriate open scholarship good practices within their disciplines.
Alliance for Open Scholarship Annual Progress Report
The Alliance for Open Scholarship (All4OS) is a cohort of societies and associations collaborating to identify, articulate, and socialize appropriate open scholarship norms within their disciplines. A central component of membership is public accountability. This report is designed to provide an overview of our collective progress in advancing open research and scholarship.
Across the 11 members of All4OS, 2023 was marked by a number of specific actions that have built capacity and understanding for open scholarship activities. Most notably, two members – the Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) and the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) – joined the Linguistics Society of America (LSA) in publicly releasing guidance on discipline-specific good open scholarship practices. These resources articulate norms related to a range of research outputs, including articles, data, code, preprints, and protocols. Importantly, they also provide a call to action for academic departments seeking to embed these principles within their hiring and review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) policies. Recognizing that the transition to an open-by-design ecosystem is not frictionless, these statements also contemplate the role of the professional society in disseminating training resources, good practices, lessons learned, and other materials to lighten the lift for members of their community. In addition to these three groups, several other All4OS members are in the process of drafting position statements tailored to their disciplines.
A number of All4OS members, including the American Mathematical Society (AMS) , the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Ecological Society of America (ESA) have convened workshops specifically devoted to open scholarship as part of their annual meetings. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has expanded upon this commitment by designating the theme of their 2023 conference as, “Wide. Open. Science.” Additionally, virtually all All4OS members have made open scholarship a regular agenda item on both administrative and volunteer leadership calls
All4OS members have prioritized open scholarship training and support as a key offering to their members. The American Historical Association (AHA) has launched the #AHRSyllabus to help teachers and students look "under the hood" at how historians in the early twenty-first century do the work of history. All #AHRSyllabus modules are freely available and designed to promote open education. The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) has continued to develop DataWorks! – a strategic initiative to foster a culture of data sharing and reuse in the biological and biomedical sciences. This includes virtual conversation spaces and help desks to engage researchers in discussions of strategies to further data sharing and reuse among research teams. Topics include FAIR and CARE principles and aligning with new federal data sharing requirements. AGU continues to offer an Open Science and Data Help Desk at major earth, space, and environmental sciences society meetings, connecting researchers with more than 300 repository and informatics experts to address domain-specific, researcher-specific questions. Both FASEB and AGU have also established awards to recognize good open scholarship practice (the DataWorks! Prize and the Open Science Recognition Prize, respectively).
Significant progress has been made this year in promoting the direct links among open research and scholarship; broader societal impacts; diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility; and community engagement. The ADSA and ASM statements all explicitly link open scholarship with these types of values, and also draw a through line with organizational missions. ESA hosted a workshop on the intersection of DEI and open access. The Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS) began planning a 2024 convening to align values and practices. With specific respect to community engagement, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has a range of public education initiatives to bring anthropological scholarship into public libraries and local communities.
Exploration of open infrastructure has been more modest. A number of societies run data or paper repositories (e.g., ESA’s VegBank, AAA’s Open Anthropology Research Repository), while others support Zenodo communities (e.g., ADSA). This has been a featured topic in several All4OS member meetings, and All4OS will continue to identify pathways for societies to support and sustain open infrastructure.
Returning to the theme of hiring and RPT, several All4OS members hosted workshops designed to explore realigning institutional incentives using a values-based approach. These sessions – overseen by APS, AAA, and the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology (a FABBS affiliate) – were designed to guide participants through the process of brainstorming what values are important to them as departments, institutions, and more broadly as disciplines; which faculty behaviors might embody these values; and how these behaviors could be considered in RPT evaluations. These workshops have led to the advancement of a joint professional society-departmental leader strategy that is currently taking shape in partnership with the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS).
As the first full year of the All4OS experiment concludes, we are especially pleased by the spirit of collaboration that has developed across members. By sharing experiences, challenges, and lessons learned, All4OS participants continue to ease the transition toward an open research ecosystem, for their members and their communities.
American Historical Association Joins Alliance for Open Scholarship
The Alliance for Open Scholarship (All4OS) is excited to welcome its newest member, the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA is the largest professional organization serving historians, and is a trusted voice advocating for history education, the professional work of historians, and the critical role of historical thinking in public life. Since its founding in 1884, the AHA has helped define disciplinary norms encompassing professional standards and ethics, innovative scholarship and teaching, academic freedom, and international collaboration. Its engagement with All4OS is a logical extension of this mission.
"Historical scholarship is a documented and disciplined conversation about matters of enduring consequence,” said Dr. Sarah Weicksel, AHA’s Director of Research and Publications. “The American Historical Association is engaged in mapping a broader terrain of scholarship, with more flexible boundaries. There are many ways to be a historian and many ways to do historical work."
All4OS welcome the AHA into our diverse cohort of societies and associations collaborating to identify, articulate, and socialize appropriate open scholarship good practices within their disciplines.
Professional Societies and Associations Launch Collaboration in Support of Open Scholarship
A diverse group of 10 professional societies and associations have joined forces to launch a bold initiative to advance open scholarship. The Alliance for Open Scholarship (All4OS) will collaborate to operationalize open scholarship principles, tailoring discipline-specific guidance on core considerations like supporting and sustaining open infrastructure; providing training on good open research and scholarship practices; and aligning awards and recognition to promote a culture of open research and scholarship.
Professional societies & associations play a unique and critical role in identifying, articulating, and socializing appropriate norms and practices within their disciplines. They help to shape a positive research culture by advancing core values including transparency, trustworthiness, equity, and inclusion. All4OS members hold a shared belief that open scholarship plays a key role in enabling their missions and advancing their fields. To that end, members are committed to accelerating the transition to a more open, equitable, and sustainable ecosystem by developing and promoting discipline-specific guidance on key topics like data management plans; FAIR and CARE data sharing principles; self-archiving; incentives; and improving public trust in science.
All4OS members - whose missions span the humanities, social sciences, behavioral sciences, life sciences and biomedicine, and physical sciences and who represent a broad global scientific community - have committed to engage with their respective communities, colleges and universities, funders and agencies, and other key actors to solicit input on, co-create, and coordinate open scholarship activities. Additionally, All4OS members will share annual public updates on specific actions and progress in service of better facilitating open research and scholarship within and across their disciplines.
“AGU is excited to foster a broad culture and robust scholarly infrastructure in support of open science,” said Randy Fiser, Executive Director and CEO of the American Geophysical Union. “Open science is the present and future of science. Challenges remain ahead but a collective voice, closely involving societies, strong engagement and continued collaboration will be critical for our future success.”
"All4OS will provide a unique collaborative forum within which professional societies and associations can advance individual and collective goals for open scholarship,” added Frank Krause, Executive Director and CEO, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). “FASEB is eager to participate in this exchange of ideas, both in aiding our 28 member societies’ open science activities and supporting DataWorks!, our multipronged platform for fostering data management and sharing in the biological and biomedical sciences."
All4OS emerges from the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science. It complements the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), a cohort of 80+ colleges and universities tackling open scholarship as a collective action opportunity.
The complete list of Alliance for Open Scholarship members includes the Academic Data Science Alliance, the American Anthropological Association, the American Geophysical Union, the American Mathematical Society, the American Society for Microbiology, the Association for Psychological Science, the Ecological Society of America, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, and the Linguistic Society of America.