Emory University has joined the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS), a collective launched in spring 2022 to advance and promote open research. Associate vice provost and university librarian Lisa Macklin will serve as the Emory representative.
More than 80 colleges and universities that are committed to advancing open research and scholarship have become HELIOS members to date, including Duke, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Purdue, Stanford and Yale universities and the University of Georgia.
HELIOS includes members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). Higher education leaders affiliated with NASEM came together to create a community of practice to promote a more transparent, inclusive and trustworthy ecosystem of open scholarship.
Emory’s participation in the HELIOS initiative will enhance the ongoing work at Emory around open access and open scholarship and the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Office. It also enhances initiatives such as:
- OpenEmory, an open access repository where Emory researchers can submit their scholarship
- The Open Access Publishing Fund
- Agreements with publishers like Cambridge University Press to allow Emory authors to publish open access articles at no cost to them
- The support for open access monographs by the Fox Center’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities
- Support for sharing scholarship and research data as required by federal funders
“We are thrilled to join HELIOS, an initiative that represents a clear unified vision for advancing open science and scholarship,” says Valeda F. Dent, Emory’s vice provost of libraries and museum. “Not only does this collective seek to promote the benefits of open work and its dissemination across all disciplines, but it also draws attention to how institutions must support this work to maximize outcomes such as accelerated discovery and sharing. This framework includes near supports, such as department chairs and deans, and institutional supports, such as presidents and provosts, all aligned to increase the likelihood that open scholarship becomes even more vibrant, inclusive and diverse, thereby strengthening the overall impact and reach of the research itself.”
The HELIOS initiative was established prior to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announcement on Aug. 25, 2022, requiring federally-funded research be made openly available to the public.
“While HELIOS pre-dates the OSTP memo, joining HELIOS facilitates collaboration with members of peer institutions who are also supporting their researchers in the transition to more open scholarship and sharing research data,” says Macklin. “We are fortunate that we have already been engaged in this work and I am happy to serve as the HELIOS representative on behalf of Emory University.”
Ranked among the top 15 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in North America, Emory Libraries serves as an interdisciplinary, intellectual commons for the Emory University campuses in Atlanta and Oxford, Georgia, with more than 4.4 million volumes, 336,000+ electronic journals, more than 1 million e-books, and internationally renowned collections. Libraries include the Woodruff Library; Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library; Goizueta Business Library; Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library; and Oxford College Library.